Telephonic Conversation with HR (10-15 mins)
It was a resume screening round. HR asked a few questions about the current organization – CTC drawn, tech stack, the reason for the switch, etc.
Since I was already an SDE-2, so she asked me whether I’d be fine to go with the SDE-1 role as my years of experience were less than 2 years which was required for the SDE-2 role. So, I agreed on it.
HR informed me that Round 1 will be a third-party screening round from JobTwine and onwards with the Parkplus people.
Technical Round 1: (JobTwine – 45 mins)
JobTwine POC will call you for your availability.
The interviewer was a little bit late, so after waiting for 10 minutes, I checked with the POC if the interviewer was available, then got to know that due to technical issues she was facing difficulty joining the call and asked me to wait for a few more minutes. After 5 mins, she joined and we started.
We started with my introduction, then there were rapid-fire questions based on CS fundamentals, OOP concepts, etc. Some of them I remember were
- What is Inheritance?
- What is an abstract class?
- Difference between run-time and compile-time polymorphism.
- Difference between aggregation and composition. etc.
Then we moved to the DSA problem- https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-linked-list/
- She asked me to code the logic on Notepad from scratch for reversing a linked list in the language of choice.
- Note that you can’t use IDE and you need to write executable code by creating a linked list from scratch and writing all the logic.
- I solved the problem, and then she asked questions related to time complexity and space complexity analysis.
Then, we moved to the Project section-
- My project mentioned was based on Java and Spring.
- So, some basic questions were asked – What is Dependency Injection, Inversion of control etc?
Tip: The interviewer was expecting a concrete answer to every conceptual-based question, so try to give a one-liner answer rather than an example.
Technical Round 2: (1 hr)
The interviewer was a little bit late, so after waiting for 10 minutes, I checked with HR for his availability, to which she notified me that he was stuck with some meetings and would join soon.
After 15 mins, the Interviewer joined the call and apologized for being late, He assured me that he wouldn’t rush the interview and would give full time to solve the problem.
He explained to me the process of the round – 2 DSA questions with some questions on CS fundamentals and SQL.
DSA Problem: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/longest-sub-array-sum-k/amp/
Note that an array can contain both -ve and +ve integers and also 0.
- I explained the brute force approach with an O(n^2) solution.
- Then he asked me if I could optimize it.
- Then I explained to him the window sliding technique to find the target sum, which he said wouldn’t work if all the elements were negative.
- I got stuck there and was trying to figure out some solution by storing the solution but could not do so.
- So, I said that I won’t be able to optimize it.
Since already 40-45 minutes had passed, so he asked me SQL query to find the third highest salary of the employee.
- Then he asked about LIMIT and OFFSET.
- He asked me if I was familiar with Computer Networks, and I denied it as I was not very well prepared for it.
- So, he concluded the interview by asking if I had any questions for him.
- I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the next round.
Tip: Be well prepared with DSA problems with topics at least covering – arrays and strings.
Verdict: Reject