Infosys Interview Experience for Specialist Programmer

Hello reader,

I was called to interview for the Specialist Programmer role after attempting to clear InfyTQ’s certification and advantage round. My slot for the advantage round was the same as the slot for the HackwithInfy round, hence my performance in the former was considered for the latter as well. Here’s a slight brief of the previous rounds:

Certification Round: 

• Three hours for the round.
• Consisted of 2 coding problems
• No penalty for wrong answers
• Problems had partial scoring
• The level of difficulty was easy – used concepts such as arrays, searching, and sorting
• 25 MCQs on concepts such as SQL, NoSQL, DBMS
• Allowed languages to code: Python, Java

Advantage Round:

• Three hours to solve three coding problems.
• Problems had higher difficulty with concepts such as DP, Greedy and Tree, and Graphs.
• Allowed languages to code: C++, Java, Python

After this, I received a mail for clearing Advantage Round and to fill in some additional information. Infosys later mailed with a slot selection option. Once their process was completed, I received another email 48 hours before the interview. My interview was scheduled for 28th May, at 16:00. The interview was an hour long and conducted on Microsoft Teams.

Interview: The interviewer was an employee of Infosys working in the Specialist Programmer role. The interviewer began by asking me to introduce myself. I started by introducing my name, college, and place of livelihood. I talked about my interest in developing MERN applications. The interviewer then looked into my resume’s projects.

• I had mentioned the use of serverless lambda functions in one of my internships. The interviewer asked me to elaborate on my experience with them and how I implemented them. The questions were straightforward and expected explicit answers.
• The interviewer told me my projects looked good and asked if all my ideas are originally mine. I informed him that one of the projects was from Smart India Hackathon. I explained a bit about SIH and then about my team. The interviewer said he was part of SIH himself in his engineering days and we discussed projects, hackathons, and competitions for around 10 minutes. 
• The interviewer then got started with questions based on the MERN stack and my React knowledge. He asked me to tell him about my experience with React and the libraries I’ve worked with. He also asked me to rate my React skills and I rated them 3.5/5. The interviewer asked why I rated it only 3.5 and I gave an appropriate justification. 
• We had a lot of discussion in-depth on my projects and I gave a detailed explanation for each project on my resume demonstrating the objectives and tech stack I’ve used for them.
• The next question was what was the hardest bug I’ve faced in a project and how did I fix it.
• After this, the interviewer asked me to give a brief on Object-Oriented Programming Systems. I talked about concepts such as abstraction, inheritance, encapsulation, etc. 
• Further up, he began with DSA (Data structures and algorithm) and asked me what’s my favorite data structure. I responded with Disjoint Set Union and why I like it. I explained that DSU provides a fast way to check if two nodes belong to the same component and is unconventional to the way DFS or BFS work. It also has a unique time complexity   which is the inverse Ackermann function. (Ref. :  https://cp-algorithms.com/data_structures/disjoint_set_union.html#union-by-size-rank).

I explained how I learned using the cp-algorithms website.

 The interviewer told me to open a code editor (anyone that I wish, online or offline) and implement the DSU. He also asked me to open the website and explain the functions in the data structure to him as if I were teaching him.  I implemented , ,  functions and then added path compression optimization. This achieves a time complexity of only . I went on to explain how we can optimize this even further using Union by size/rank. 

C++14

void make_set(int v) {
    parent[v] = v;
    size[v] = 1;
}
int find_set(int v) {
    if (v == parent[v])
        return v;
    return parent[v] = find_set(parent[v]);
}
void union_sets(int a, int b) {
    a = find_set(a);
    b = find_set(b);
    if (a != b) {
        if (size[a] < size[b])
            swap(a, b);
        parent[b] = a;
        size[a] += size[b];
    }
}

The interviewer was done with the questions after this. For the rest of the 15 minutes left in the hour, we discussed the Infosys office in Mysore, the work culture, the training period, work from home v/s work from an office, etc. The discussion was casual and light-hearted.

Result: Not yet declared as of 22nd September, 2022.