Harness Interview Experience For Software Engineer 2024

Previous Position – Software Engineer II

Previous Organisation – Sabre

Location – Bengaluru, India

Years of Experience – 1.5 years of Experience

Telephonic Conversation with HR (10-15 mins):

HR approached on LinkedIn with the job opening. I expressed my interest in it so, we had a telephone conversation after it.

• HR asked a few questions about my current organization – CTC drawn, tech stack, work experience etc.
• After that, she explained about Harnesses and the basic stuff that they do.
• Then she explained the interview process which would have three technical Rounds revolving around DSA and System Design and asked me for my availability for the same.
• After deciding on a date, I received invites for two problem-solving rounds from HR for the same date with a buffer of 1 hour.

Technical Round 1: (1 hr )

We started with our introductions, Interviewer was a senior developer at Harness with 5 years of Experience.

He directly jumped on the problem-solving part.

DSA Problem 1: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/search-in-row-wise-and-column-wise-sorted-matrix/

• I discussed the approach and then he asked me to code it.
• I coded it on my personal IDE and explained the logic simultaneously.
• Then I showed by searching for some key and edge cases. He seemed to be satisfied with it.
• Then he asked me for time and space complexity analysis. I already gave the most optimized solution. So, we jumped to the next problem.

DSA problem 2: https://leetcode.com/discuss/study-guide/1886481/minimum-time-taken-to-burn-the-binary-tree-from-a-node

I was not very well prepared for the trees. So, I took 3-4 mins and said that I was not comfortable with trees and asked politely if he could ask some other problem.

The interviewer was kind, so he gave me another problem.

DSA problem 3: https://leetcode.com/problems/paint-house/description/

I first discussed the recursive approach to solving the problem and then showed how it contains overlapping problems and would be optimized using DP.

• He seemed to be satisfied with it and asked to code for it.
• I thought to write a recursive solution first and then come up with a Memoization.
• To my surprise, I was not able to come up with the recursive function properly – which took another 15-20 mins.
• After that, he said that since running out of time, he needed to conclude the interview and asked if I had any questions.
• I wasn’t sure if he would select me as I was not able to code 2nd problem. After half an hour, HR cancelled my second interview.

Overall Experience: The interviewer was a kind person and helped me by giving the necessary hints.

Tip: Don’t directly code the optimized problem, as it would depict that you already know how to solve it. I made a mistake by giving a directly optimized solution for the first problem, the interviewer thought to raise the level of questions.

Verdict: Reject