Josh Technology Group Interview Experience for SDE

This was an on-campus opportunity for batch 2023 passing graduates for SD (Software Developer role) and FE ( Frontend Engineer role). This was my experience in the SD role. First, it consists of three rounds for appearing in the interview. It consists of MCQ, Subjective and Coding rounds. The first three rounds are on the same day. Writing comments add some idea of your approach in subjective and coding rounds increases your probability of qualifying the rounds. Each round was an elimination round.

Round 1: MCQ Round: This round consists of 50 MCQs related to pointers, output prediction, OOPs, and some programming fundamentals questions. The time duration for the round was 50 minutes. Some aptitude questions were also there. Having a decent knowledge of OOPs and pointers will be an advantage to qualify for this round.

Round 2: Subjective Round: This round consists of three coding questions and one question based on output prediction. The duration of the round was 75 minutes. Questions are:

• A string contains only two characters ‘I’ and ‘D’ where ‘I’ represents the increasing sequence and ‘D’ represents the decreasing sequence. Find the minimum number without repetition of the numbers such that it follows the sequence given in the string. The numbers used in the sequence must be greater than zero. We have to print ‘String not found’ if the size of the string is zero and if the size of the string is greater than 8 we have to print ‘String length exceeds’.

       INPUT: IDIDI
      OUTPUT: 132546

• We are given a binary tree. The task is to transform every left child node odd by subtracting one and even child node even by adding one to it. We have to write solutions in linear time complexity and constant space.
  We are given an array of sizes ‘N’. The task is to count greater elements on the left side of each array element.

     INPUT: 5
                  1 2 3 4 5
    OUTPUT: -1 1 2 3 4

Round 3: Coding Round: This round consists of three coding questions. I remember only two of the questions. The duration of the round was 75 minutes. Questions are:

• Given a linked list. Update the value of each node by the sum of itself data and (n – k)th node data.
• We are given a circular array of size ‘N’. We have to find the maximum subarray of size non-empty subarray.

Interview Round 1: The round starts with an introduction. The interviewer was very friendly. He didn’t ask much about my projects and suddenly shifted to DSA questions. The whole Interview was taken on Calyxpod. He asked me two questions. The duration of the interview was about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Questions are:

• You are given an array arr[] of N integers including 0. The task is to find the smallest positive number missing from the array. Link of the question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/smallest-positive-missing-number-1587115621/1
• My approach:
  • We replace the negative values with n+1 values so that they will be out of the range.
  • We make the index negative if we found that value in the array.
  • We identify the index which is not negative and it will be the missing number.
• Given a binary tree. Find the size of its largest subtree which is a Binary Search Tree. Link of the question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/largest-bst/1
• My approach:
  • I will make a solve function that will contain four values at any moment.
  • BST or not
  • Max size of till find BST
  • Till minimum value we encountered 
  • Till maximum value we encountered.
• The interviewer provides different test cases and asks me to tell the output based on written code. DRY RUN of my code.

Interview Round 2:There were two Interviewers. The duration of the interview was about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Yes, you read it right, around 3 hrs. They ask me two DSA questions during the whole round. Questions are:

• The first question was related to Binary Search. The question was very much related to the question Koko Eating Bananas present on leetcode. Just a change of story was there. Link of the question: https://leetcode.com/problems/koko-eating-bananas/
• I wrote the code and they provided me an array of size 12 and ask me to dry run on the test case till I don’t get the answer.  
• We have given a BST. In the tree, generally, we have two pointers i.e left and right but here they also provide another point named as parent pointer which is pointing to its parent. Consider a node containing left, right as well as parent pointer. Now they have given an integer ‘K’, the task to us is to find all the pairs in BST whose sum is K.

I told them three different approaches, but still, they are not satisfied. They want me to write code in linear time complexity and constant space. Still, I don’t know how to do this. If you get any idea on this please comment below.

Verdict: Rejected

Overall it was a nice experience. After getting this close and facing failure feels bad. But life is not about giving up. Keep coding and keep hustling. I  hope that this experience gives you some motivation. A strong suggestion is to comment on your different approaches so that it helps the community. Thanks and goodbye.