Round 1:
The interviewer didn’t care about my intro he had opened my resume and just read my experience I was doing an internship in a reputable startup in their sector itself so he was more interested in that.
So he asked me to describe my experience.
- Which involved questions like?
- What does Javascript do in Nodejs?
- What is asynchronous coding in Nodejs?
- What is Single Threaded Programming?
- What does an API call do in ur firm does it make a call to DDB first or to the cache first?
- Ok, If it makes it to DDB then how does cache work in that sense and what does the TTL(Time to Live of the Key) do in that case?
- What do SQL and NOSQL databases mean?
- Then He asked me If a Zomato Order Table has to be created which needs to be used by the company for Reading: Order Details, Payment Details, etc.
- So for this what type of DB should be used and why? SQL or NoSQL.
- Then I got kinda confused he asked me, Why do I think NoSQL is highly profitable? Why we cannot use SQL in case of reading high data?
- Which is more useful for Scalability SQL or NoSQL? If one then why?
- I said NoSQL then he asked me can we not scale at all with SQL.
- Why your firm is using Golang over Nodejs and what does Golang bring that Nodejs doesn’t?
- Then he moved to my projects. He asked me about my most proud project that I would like to showcase to him. I answered a project like Quora.
- So he asked me to write down the DB schema of Quora and while I moved to the table structure he asked me to stop and started asking me to write queries based on them.
Most of those were like from the topic: Group-by, Inner Join, Count, If Else, EQUALS.
It had 3 Questions of Query, and solving all of them was compulsory for me If I didn’t write them correctly I would be rejected.
- Involved Find the Second Maximum, Find the Count and Author of the column
- Now he asked me what are serializers. What is their role in Django?
- What is the difference b/w Authentication and Authorization?
- What happens when we write “www.google.com” on the browser tab? While discussing some basic questions arose like: IP-Address? Router? Local Router? ISP?
- If Google changes its IP address how does the Router know it the IP address has been changed?
There were around 20 minutes left he asked me to open my terminal and start coding a DSA problem, I knew doing it fast and then only I could clear the round I skipped the brute force waali backchodi sidha and moved to the optimized one.
Problem Statement:
Imagine that you want to schedule a meeting of a certain duration with a co-worker. You have access to your calendar and your co-worker’s calendar (both of which contain your respective meetings for the day, in the form of [startTime, endTime]), as well as both of your daily bounds (i.e., the earliest and latest times at which you’re available for meetings every day, in the form of [earliestTime, latestTime]). Write a function that takes in your calendar, your daily bounds, your co-worker’s calendar, your co-worker’s daily bounds, and the duration of the meeting that you want to schedule, and that returns a list of all the time blocks (in the form of [startTime, endTime]) during which you could schedule the meeting, ordered from earliest time block to latest.
Note that times will be given and should be returned in military time.
For example:
8.30, 9:01, 23:56
Input
calendar1 = [[‘9:00′, ’10:30’], [‘noon’, ’13:00′], [’16:00′, ’18:00′]]
dailyBounds1 = [‘9:00′, ’20:00’]
calendar2 = [[’10:00′, ’11:30′], [’12:30′, ’14:30′], [’14:30′, ’15:00′], [’16:00′, ’17:00′]]
dailyBounds2 = [’10:00′, ’18:30′]
meeting duration = 30
Output
[[’11:30′, ‘noon’], [’15:00′, ’16:00′], [’18:00′, ’18:30′]]
I made my approach to the interviewer clear and as I knew the time was running out, I made sure to make him through the test case, He got the gist and asked me to code it down quickly around 10 minutes were left.
I coded it and before seeing the code he asked me why do we write “using namespace std” above the C++ program.
Then asked me to stop and then asked if I had any questions and left.
Verdict:
- Strong Candidate(The HR told me when I asked about my response),
- Good in Problem-Solving (As the initial minutes of the Second Round interviewer told me )
Round 2:
Problem-Solving and DSA(Title of the GMeet Interview)
Pre-Mindset of the Interview: Ye tho ekdum full DSA round hoga 2 question dega or bs solve kro complexity btaoo and done and dusted, But as every interviewer always surprises u so he also did:
As the previous interviewer told me you sound good in DSA already let’s not do the traditional way of problem-solving round.
I will give u a theme or a scenario and u need to get the problem statement from my scenario design a class-based approach write the logic for implementing this feature:
He said to look at your browser tab and see there is a back button cursor, there is a forward button cursor and there is a new tab URL where if u write the URL in the tab it should open a new URL.
Now figure out all the testcases that are possible and what data structure will be used to implement this feature. Also, do the optimizations that can be done once I write the whole code?
Pro-Tip:
- Think of this as an LLD round where you need to first see what DS to use, then define the class, methods, public methods, and private methods, at last covering the normal case and then moving to the edge case.
- Design the structure in a way you can handle all the cases making sure your code is clean and able to reduce redundancy and optimizations.
- Just keep writing and saying whatever u think as he is listening and try to write it as in this way only the interviewer can visualise what u are trying to see or explain to him.
I don’t want to write more about this question solution as it may vary for each one of you, and questions can arise based on that approach I had listed mine all.
At last, He also moved to my Dev part again :
- What is Redis, What do u know about Redis?
- What work have u done with Kafka and What are producer and consumer?
- Some basic questions about SQL and NoSQL?
- As I had done a deployment of a Django Server on the AWS service, So questions about what service I had used of AWS, what more I know about AWS and some basic stuff around it.
- Backend frameworks that I have worked with tech I used in them?
- What do you know in frontend and what tech have learnt personally in the frontend arena like ReactJS, Redux, etc?
Then the interview ended and finally, the interview ended.
Verdict :
Selected, and the HR called me and how early I joined the team
P.S: If u are thinking that these interview questions were quite hard for the intern expectation let me tell you high high-paying established startups have good levels of interviews not like Amazon, Microsoft, etc just fixed pattern questions. Stop following those standard influencers’ advice to just do 24×7 DSA cause baby you are in 2024 not in 2020-22.
Also, I had a pretty strong profile(Done 3 internships previously) as these questions came from my resume itself so this is normal for me.