Arcesium Internship Interview Experience for SDE | On-Campus 2023

Arcesium visited our campus ( an NIT ) in July 2022 at the end of 2nd year of our college, offering a 2-month Summer Internship for 2023.

There were a total of 5 Rounds ( 1 Online Round ( Day 1 ) + 4 Interview Rounds( Day 2) ).

Eligibility: CSE, IT ( CPI > 7 ), and ECE ( CPI > 8 )

Job Profile: Software Developer Intern ( Batch – 2024 ).

In spite of eligibility given a shortlisting was made once again before the Online Round and only selected candidates were allowed to take the online round ( approx 150-200 were shortlisted to take the test ).

Round 1: Online Round ( 1 hr 20 min )

There were 3 sections with each section bounded by time with a 25% negative marking for each wrong answer.

Section 1 – MAT 15 questions 20 minutes

Filled with Quantitative aptitude questions which were not easy that’s for sure Topics – Profit Loss, Work & Time, Probability, Basic Maths, etc ( The time allotted was significantly less which made it very tough ).

Section 2 – CS Fundamentals 15 questions 15 minutes

A lot of java pseudo code questions ( I code in C++ but those were quite tough for java users too ) with oops, threads, etc all in java were asked, and there were questions on AVL tree, heaps, OS, etc. 

Section 3 – 2 Coding Questions 45 minutes

• Maximize sum of K corner elements in Array
• Other was based on strings 

( 11 Shortlisted for interviews ) 

Round 2 – HackerRank Code Pair ( 1 hour 15 minutes )

The interviewer was a Tech Lead with 5 years in the company, He started with his introduction and then asked for mine. He was very friendly and after a few normal conversations, he moved on to a coding question and the question was –

Question – Given a sorted Infinite array we have to find a given element M in it. He asked me to give as many approaches as I can and each time I gave an approach he would write it and then it was followed by time complexity analysis and cases where it failed.

1. I began with Linear Search – O(n) he told ok it’s not at all optimal what’s next
2. Difference method I would check with a difference and move forward ( He quickly wrote the test case – 1,10^100,10^1000, …. and I have to find 10^100 in the array, in this difference will be very large ).
3. Sliding Window of size K followed by binary Search ( O(n/k) + binary search to which he again said n >>>> k so k can be ignored so we still at O(n) )
4. Binary Search with a very large number as endpoint ( to which he again gave 10^100 case I mentioned above ). Now I was blank and after a couple of minutes, I asked for some directional hint – to which he pointed me towards a dynamic window type of thing.
5. To which I proposed we will increase window size each time we couldn’t find the element and so on thus covering the whole array in a smaller time ( Now he smiled 🙂 )
6. He asked what window size ?? ( I said starting with 1 and doubling it each time and I linked it with a dynamic array that follows the same principle (the size of the array is doubled when it gets filled up ) ).
7. Why only double why not triple, four times… ??? ( to which I explained we will get the most optimal window size. By tripling our window size will always be greater than that obtained by doubling thus performing a binary search would take longer and along with that we are able to decrease n in each step thus doubling is the minimum and at the same time most optimal factor here ).
8. What’s the Time complexity now and how do we get that ( Derive it he meant ).
9. Code it quickly
10. “It was a good explanation even for me” ( He said with a broad smile 🙂 ).

Now he started with OOPs first with the basics

Polymorphism, Overloading, etc.. then he started making classes and then what will be the output each time changing something, and again the same followed, Then he made a structure that reassembled the diamond problem ( which I didn’t know ) I told him about the same still he continued to ask some other questions regarding the same structure and in a way made me solve it without knowing it !!

In the end, he asked me if I had any questions, to which I asked about his experience with Arcesium and expectations from an intern he answered all of them nicely, He was just awesome 🙂

(6 Shortlisted for further rounds )

Round 3 – HackerRank Code Pair ( 1 hour 10 minutes )

Just a minute after the first round I got my round 2 mail scheduled 10 minutes from then. Again interviewer was a Tech Lead with 5 years in the company. She began with her intro and then I introduced myself. Then she asked about my projects, tech stacks used, how it works, etc. After this, she asked whether I had done any internship previously ( I was a Teaching Assistant so I told her about that ) and what all subjects have been taught till now.

Now she moved on to OOPs. As expected she started from the basics and then kept on diving deep until I couldn’t answer 🙁

She started with pillars of OOPs and then asked to explain the same using some real-life examples and continued firing questions without any break 

• Static keyword, Why do we use it ?, Can we make a class static ??, What would happen if we made class static ??,
• Constructor, Destructor, What’s inheritance? , Can the constructor be inherited?
• Types of Polymorphism, Explain them !! , What’s binding? What is static binding, Dynamic Binding? , Differences between them and Explain by taking appropriate classes.
• Virtual keyword? , why use it? , explain with an example, Abstract classes? etc…

She continued asking and asked almost everything about OOPs but she wasn’t done yet

Now she started creating classes and changing them, extending them, and then asked what will be the output ?? ,( after changing ) Now ??… continued doing the same until I couldn’t answer 🙁

Now I was expecting a Coding question but that didn’t happen

Now It was time for DBMS and it went again like the same starting from the basics

• What is Database ?, RDBMS ??
•  Normalization?, Why Normalise a table? Explain with an example !! , Denormalization? , Why would we denormalize a table then if normalization is beneficial? Explain!
• ACID properties, Explain each one of them and how that property is achieved.
• What difference between TRUNCATE, DELETE, and DROP, Which one among DELETE and TRUNCATE is faster? Why?
• Primary Key, Foreign Key? Explain by drawing a table how we use the foreign keys and how it benefits us.
• Now she started with SQL
• She gave me a table and asked me to write queries for the questions she was asking, She asked me to write 5 queries I could only write 3 and explain one more.
• What are locks? How and why they are used? etc….

Now OS

• What is an OS? , Why do we need it?
• Processes? How do they communicate? Explain any one type of IPC.
• Fragmentation and its types, Explain them
• System calls and a few more.

The Complete Round was theoretical Only ( Even for my friend )
Finally, she asked me if I had any questions to which I repeated the same questions from Round 2 which she answered nicely. After 2 hours of waiting got my round 4 mail 

( 5 shortlisted for further rounds )

Round 4 – HackerRank Code Pair ( 45 minutes )

The interviewer this time was Associate Director with 17 years of experience. She started with how my previous rounds went. Tired now? etc. Then begin with her introduction and asked me the same. She asked about my project to which I explained, which language do you code in? Do you know Linux? Tell me what all have been taught till now ( till 4th sem ) and explain in short to which I drove her through our course explaining what we learned what we were taught etc.

Now she began with OS

• What is OS? Why OS? How does OS provide an interface to the user ( Follow Up from the previous one )? Explain with examples about the whole procedure.
• System calls? Explain the procedure.
• Process Synchronization? How it’s achieved ( Locks etc.. )? Explain it. Why it’s important?
• Few more basics questions on OS and DBMS

Now she said “I know you can solve the question” and gave me a Coding question that was Easy – Medium

Question – Given a sorted array with duplicates I just have to bring all unique elements towards the front in the same array with the condition that the ending of the array is not known ( ie.. I can’t use the ending to solve it ) and return the index of the last element.
Ex – [1,1,2,2,2,3,3]
Output – [1,2,3,X,X,X] X-> can be anything

It was pretty simple I gave the hashMap approach first to which she agreed and then asked for better in terms of space Then I just used two pointers and solved it. She asked me to code it which I did quickly and checked the code for some test cases. She asked some more basic questions on arrays and linked lists and then which one will you use if we have to delete, add, etc.. ( Basic stuff )

She suddenly started asking HR questions that I didn’t expect

• Why do you want to join Arcesium? , Why only Arcesium?
• Where do you see yourself in 10 years? etc ….

After some normal conversation, the round ended, This round was pretty light for me Just 2 minutes after the round I received HR round mail.

( 2 shortlisted for HR Round )

Round 5 – HR Round ( 35 minutes )

It was a zoom meeting this time. HR started with his introduction and then I did. Then he opened my resume and started reading it out loud. He opened my project which was a game and asked me to explain what it is and how to play he even played it once 😛

Then he asked about the motivation for the project and why I made it. Since it was a game he asked me what would I do if I was made CEO of a gaming company and what would I do for its growth ( i just told him about exploring and introducing new things etc. )

He started taking feedback about the complete process and then something new he asked me for stipends offered by other companies and said it was a statistics thing so as to check if we offer the right or not.

Then he asked me if I had any questions to which I asked about his experience with Arcesium and this time he just began describing everything, he then walked me through the menu of the office, the laptops then whatnot, I was just sitting and listening to his story.

In the end, he said okay then, hope we will meet soon ( Relief was the next level)

Finally, the interview process ended and the results came at 8:30 pm the same day. 

2 Interns were selected for the internship and I was one of them .