SRIB visited our campus for hiring summer interns. Students with more than 7.5 CGPA were eligible for the internship. There was one coding round and two Technical Interview rounds. All the rounds were online, due to COVID’19.
Round 1: Coding Round:
The coding round was of 70 minutes with three questions. It was conducted on cocubes platform .We were not allowed to use STL to solve the problems.
The Problems were:
- Given an array of integers which are present in arithmetic progression, return the integer that is not present in arithmetic progression.
- Given a tree, make a Linked List from the top view of the tree and return the head pointer of the linked list.
- Given a tree, count the number of nodes whose value is greater than all node values in the right child.
Round 2: Technical Round 1
Time: Around 50 min.
- The Interview started with the interviewer asking me to introduce myself. Then he asked me to explain all the concepts of OOPs with real life example. I came up with a answer by myself and he was satisfied.
- Then he saw that I had used MongoDB in my project, so he asked me how is MongoDB different from traditional Relational databases and it’s advantages. Then he started the discussion that if Samsung has to build a music playing software how can they do it?
- Then the questions followed this discussion, how would you develop an auto recommendation system i.e. if someone starts to enter a music name the system should automatically recommend the matching songs.
- The next question was whenever someone likes a music the rating of that particular music should increase by one, how would you store ratings of all the songs ? I came up with a hashmap based solution
- The next question was to get the list of the top k liked music from all music and the list should get updated whenever a new song is liked I gave a priority queue based solution for this. Then he asked me to implement it without STL? Should I use max heap or min heap?
- Then he asked to display the list of top K singers , whenever a song is liked the singers associated with that song also get liked.
- The last question was to make a structure or class so that all these details such as the song, the singers, their ratings can be stored for every song.
This round was more of application based and one has to properly understand the question and use DSA based knowledge to solve all these problems.
Round 3: Technical Round 3
Time: 45 min
- The second round started with the interview making me comfortable by asking question like how is your health? How is your family? etc.
- Then he asked me to explain in brief both my projects. I took my time and explained both of them. Then he asked me two coding problems:
- Given an array nums, you have to reorder the array such that all the zeroes come to the left side and all the non-zeroes come to the right side. Make sure that the order of non-zeroes should be preserved.
- I had to do this problem without using any extra space i.e O(1) space and return the array
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/majority-element/amp/
- I gradually optimized the problem, the final answer was to be given in O(N) complexity and O(1) space.
- Then he asked me the difference between hashmap and map?
At last he asked me if I have any questions about Samsung and the interview ended.
Result: I was selected.
Tips:
- Understand the question properly and then start thinking about the solution.
- Be honest, if you don’t know something admit it.
- Try to optimize your solution.
- Take hints from the interviewer, they would definitely help you if you are stuck.
- Never be silent or loose track of the conversation.