Mastercard Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus) 2022

Recently MASTERCARD visited our campus for SDE intern recruitment and below is my experience 🙂 There were overall 3 rounds conducted. 

• Online Coding Test.
• Technical Round 1
• Technical Round 2 + HR

The coding round was online and the interviews were offline.

Round 1: Coding round:  Two questions were asked:

• There was a string given consisting of words separated by white space, we have to return the pair number of in each word where a pair of two neighbor characters is valid if they follow a lexicographical order. (level – easy)

For eg : INPUT: “hello world”
OUTPUT: 21  (2 because in “hello” ‘e’ and ‘l’, ‘l’ and ‘o’ are in lexicographical order, and in the word “world” only ‘o’ and ‘r’ are in lexicographical order so 1 for the word world).

• Bob wants to purchase N pens and he has prepared a list of shops that sell the pens. Each shop charges a different price per pen and has a limited quantity available in stock. Along with the price of pens each shop charges fixed delivery fees irrespective of how many pens are brought. Help Bob to get N pens as cheaply as possible. (It was a medium DP problem similar to the knapsack problem).

INPUT: The first line of input has N and S respectively where N = the number of pens bob needs and S is the number of shops. Next S lines have 3 integers Q, P, D where Q = stock of pens available at the shop, P = price per pen, and D = delivery fee.

Sample Test Case : 

10 2
5 5 50
1000 10 0

OUTPUT: 100

600+ students gave the coding round and after that, 69 students were shortlisted.

Technical Interview 1: Started with my intro (Which included both tech and nontech parts). He asked how I developed an interest in web development.

• I told him that I tried app development in the first year but later got interested in web development so he asked if tomorrow there comes a situation where there is a requirement for app development and then if I am open to learning app development.
• He also asked even after trying app development if I did not get interested in it what will do?
• Why C++ for programming, not JAVA?
• Project discussion of my club website. He asked about different features, what was my role, what tech stack we used, and how I implemented different features.  It was a live project so he was quite impressed and went deep and asked many questions.
• How many different data structures are there?
• What are the types of trees?
• Explain oops with real-life examples.
• When do we use linked lists?
• I was the content and design lead of the CodeChef chapter of my college so he asked about my role and what events I organized.
• He asked if I knew about logs forging.
• He asked if I had some questions for him.
• I asked him one question: On what kind of projects I will be working on if I get an internship at Mastercard? Will they be a live project?

After technical round 1,  40 students were shortlisted.

2nd Technical + HR interview: Since it was a long day, he asked if I was tired.

• He didn’t ask for an intro. He started directly asking questions about my resume.
• He first asked how many questions I was able to solve in the coding round.
• When he saw that I have done my 10th from west Bengal and 12th from Pune he asked me if I belong to an army background.
• He asked if I had appeared for JEE and what my score was and how I prepared for JEE.
• why C++, not java?
• What is outer join?
• Why not GRE?
• What are stored procedures?
• What is union in SQL (explained to him with Venn diagram)
• He asked about my projects (just the intro). He asked how we integrated razor pay on the website. 
• He asked me to explain the 4 pillars of oops with real-life examples.
• He tried to confuse me by saying abstraction and encapsulation are looking the same by listening to your example and I clearly told him the difference between both them.
• He had given 3 classes(vehicle and tire). He asked me which class will inherit which class.  (here vehicle class will have a “HAS A ” relationship with tire class.
• He asked about my future plans and why I don’t want to go for higher education (excluding the financial reason).
• He asked about the difference between MongoDB and SQL databases.
• I had won one coding and debugging contest so he asked what I debugged in the code. I told him it was in python language and there were syntactical and indentation errors. He asked who we have an indentation in python and not in C++.
• He said he is not able to see java anywhere in my resume so I told him that I know java basics as I had java in my Second year oops. He then asked why java is a platform-independent language.
• He asked if I had some questions for him.
• I asked him if I get a chance to be an intern will I get a preference to choose my tech stack? 

The interview ended.

After the technical round 2 +HR,  13 students were shortlisted and I got selected 🙂

Keep a smiling and bright face and have an engaging conversation. Most importantly, be genuine and thorough with your resume, and never write anything fake! just stay calm throughout the process and try to communicate as best you can with the interviewer.