Expedia Groups Interview Experience for Associate Software Developer (Dec 2020)

This was an off-campus placement drive from Expedia. 

The interview experience was seamless and every employee from HR to interviewer was cooperative.

There were majorly 4 rounds, and bad performance in any one of them could hold your selection.

It started with the basic Coding round on HackerRank:

3 questions were asked, they were Easy-Medium level questions, and the time provided was 2 hours to complete them.

1. Run Length Encoding. 
2. The Second Question was on Dynamic Programming and was of Medium level. You can have the initial intuition of DP itself.
3. Knight’s Problem

I was able to solve these 3 questions and still had some time left.

Technical Interview 1:

This was held on day 1, and it was held on BluePages platform and again Easy level questions were asked. The duration was of 1 hour.

Initially, I was asked about my previous internships and on what tech stack I have worked on. There was a very brief discussion about my resume, and we jumped right into DSA part.

The interviewer wanted me to think out loud so that she could understand my thought process and wanted me to write ready-to-execute code.

1. Valid Mountain Array (https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-mountain-array/) is a fairly easy level question and I think I explained and wrote the solution in 15 minutes.
2. Widest Vertical Area Between Two Points Containing No Points(https://leetcode.com/problems/widest-vertical-area-between-two-points-containing-no-points/), though this problem is stated Medium on LeetCode, but it’s relatively easy. 
3. As the time was not left much, she wanted to know my approach to merge two sorted linked lists.

Technical Interview 2:

I had two interviews on this day Technical 2 and Managerial Round. It was also held on BluePages, and was of 1-hour duration.

The interviewer wanted me to reach out to the most optimal approach in terms of time and space complexities. 

We had a great talk as one of my projects caught his eyes, and he has himself worked on the same problem. It took around 20 minutes of discussion on that, as the discussion was very constructive, and had almost felt the same level of problems when working on that project.

Then DSA part happened, 2 questions were asked as time was spent on resumes.

1. Set Matrix Zeroes(https://leetcode.com/problems/set-matrix-zeroes/), intuitively this is an easy problem, but the catch was to solve this using constant space, I solved it with using as minimum space as I can. Then the interviewer showed a hint, and I was able to solve it.
2. Two Binary Trees are the same or not. As the name suggests, I had to return True or False if two trees were the same or not. Two roots were given, and I solved them using extra space. Yes, I understand this was not the most optimal solution. So he wanted me to solve it without using space, and I was unable to solve it. I understand it’s a very easy problem, but at that point, I cannot, and this stated that I had a very supple grasp over my chosen language (Python), if it was C++, it would’ve shown errors and I would’ve rectified it. So this was the red flag in my whole interview experience, he really wanted me to solve it, this interview was supposed to be an hour-long, but it lasted 1 hr and 45 min.

Managerial Round: 

After not being able to solve that easy question I knew that I was not going to make the cut, but still, I gave the best in my 4th interview.

The interviewer was having 8+ YOE in Expedia, and we had a great talk. He asked about:

1. What was the biggest problem you faced in this pandemic period? ,
2. What did you work upon in your internship? ,
3. Explain one algorithm which you like most and is used in industry mostly. I answered Hashing, and then he wanted me to explain how it works, I explained everything I knew on hashing.
4. He asked me what is Virtual Memory.
5. Then he asked me a question, in which I had to order them according to their speed, it was Cache,  HDD, SSD, L1 register, L2 register, etc.

That’s it, about the interview experience, the managerial round is always to check how well do you fit in their work culture.

After 2 days mail came and the final verdict was stated in which I was not selected.