Open In App

One97 Interview Experience | Set 2

Improve
Improve
Like Article
Like
Save
Share
Report

My Interview Experience with One97

My Experience: 1.5+ year. I am from a premium engineering college of India. Apart from the regular job I do freelancing and (sometimes) write articles for CodeProject, if I happen to find something really out of the box

How I Applied?

I saw on the Linkedin profile that One97 is hiring people, so I applied for the job and got the call just next day.

Expected number of rounds : 3, (The third interview is taken only if a candidate clears the first two interviews)

Round 1:

Began with the introduction. Why are you looking for another job blah blah?

Then he gave me a puzzle that there are two robots in the air and they have a parachute each with them. On each, there is a big infinite assembly of cells units. The robots land on the assembly of the chain. Now that cell remembers whether a robot landed and placed parachute on it or not. Now you have to program the robots in such a way that they meet after some time. There should be only one function which does that (for both the robots). A robot has the option to either move left or right or stand still.

Then he asked me a question that there is a large array. With 0’s initially and 1’s at the end. You need to find out the position of the first one.

NOTE(Just in the interviewer is reading this): I read somewhere recently that person should always ask questions to the interviewer before start coding. So, I never did that when I was in my college, actually never had to because 99% of the questions are either from GeeksforGeeks or careercup or the pdf – How to crack the coding interview. Well, I had a genuine question that by large you mean infinite or finite array. The interviewer suddenly looked blanked when he heard infinite and binary search together. I am pretty sure he must be thinking about what will the last index and how will I calculate mid in that case. But, binary search can be modified to look for an element even if you don’t know ‘n’.

Then some questions related to the freelancing work I do. Then another “coding” question to segregate even and odd numbers – again form GeeksforGeeks.

One question on ArrayList and LinkList. And few small questions related to Java(like the difference between xyz and abc) – which I have no clue, how does that help the interviewers to judge a candidate’s java knowledge. But the interviewer was happy and I was happy.

Round 2:

The weirdest interview I have ever had. First question – What is coupling and cohesion. I told him what I remembered from Sangeeta Sabharwal book I read back in college.

Then he asked me about my resume – that how can I work in two companies (one of which was freelancing) and being a girl how can I be into technology. The idea altogether seemed very confusing to him, plus I was appearing for Dev profile. Well, he asked me to name a few data structures from Java. I answered quite a few like “ArrayList”, “Set”, “Stacks”, “Queues”. Then he asked me to name a data structure in Java which is the actual implementation of Queues – this was the only sane question till this point. Then he all of a sudden started shouting – that I don’t know Java blah blah. If he ever gives me the assignment to get data from the database, populate POJOs with it and then convert it into JSON, then I won’t be able to do that- because I don’t know the difference between ArrayList and List (which he definitely assumed in his head).

Then he asked me to name the library which converts POJO to JSON object. I said there is some third-party API, whose name I don’t remember. He asked the question on database queries and indices-which made sense. Then he asked me any questions- I felt like asking are you the only one insane and dumb here or everybody here is the same, but then I said no and he rushed to HR. The HR came with the feedback but before she could give me the feedback, I told her about the interviewer and asked her to keep the feedback with herself.

The point I want to make is that first of all, a programmer’s work can never get limited by a language. Plus Java, C#, Python are something which just translates your thoughts/algorithm into something runnable. Secondly, in my 1.5 years of experience, I have never crammed the API documentation of either Java or C# or Python. My idea is to just start writing “Hello World”, the associated modules, data structures will automatically come to your head. Even then, I have never fared less than any other computer programmer because ultimately what makes a difference is whether you have the brains to visualize how will data move in the memory, which operation will you mostly use-deletion, insertion, updation, sorting etc, the knowledge of ArrayList, List, LinkList will follow. All you need is to be clear about in your head how threads will access the static variables, how will they work simultaneously keep their own copy of variables, which variable I want to protect and which variable do I need to be updated by all threads. To understand the API and more important to tweak the API is not more than an hour’s work.

Most importantly, don’t aim to become a crammer, become a programmer.

Related Practice Problems


Last Updated : 28 May, 2019
Like Article
Save Article
Previous
Next
Share your thoughts in the comments
Similar Reads