Thoughtworks Interview Experience | (On-Campus)

In July 2018 Thoughtworks visited our campus for recruitment. We had total 5 rounds out of which later 3 interview rounds were held at Thoughtworks, Pune.

Round 1: Rapid Coding Round

(In college campus)

This round had 5 simple coding problems which has to be solved in 40 minutes. In this round they were looking for speed and handling of corner cases only. Programming logic, naming & efficiency was not the concern.

The round was offline coding round (use of IDEs was allowed) with manual checking.

Questions:

1. Given a string of letters (R, G, B) print “True” if all socks are in pairs otherwise print “False”.
   Example:
   Input: RGRBGB
   Output: True
   Input: RGRBRG
   Output: False
2. Given two strings, print the first string without the characters that are present in second string.
   Example:
   Input: skyIsblue eyes
   Output: kIblu
3. Given an integer n & a string, shift all the letters in the string by n (except punctuation & spaces).
   Example:
   Input:
   3
   sky Is Blue!
   Output: vnb Lv Eoxh!
4. Given an integer n followed by n space separated integers, sort the number at even index in ascending order & numbers at odd index in descending order. Print the output on two separate lines.
   Example:
   Input:
   7
   12 100 5 10 34 17 84
   Output:
   5 12 34 84
   100 17 10
5. Given two integers n & m,  and matrix of size n x m, double the elements at the edges of the matrix and halve the rest of the elements.
   Example:
   Input:
   3 3
   10 5 4
   12 8 14
   1 3 18
   Output:
   20 10 8
   24 4 28
   2 6 36

Students who solved 3 or more problems, were shortlisted for the next round.

Round 2: Object Oriented Design Round

(In college campus)

This round was offline round where we have to design solution for given single problem statement in 45 minutes with OOD. Proper use of OOD concepts & naming was important. Use of IDEs and any language of choice was allowed.

This round is crucial, and as the checking is manual, you have to explain your solution properly to the checker with good Object Oriented Design principles.

Round 3: Technical Interview

(At ThoughtWorks Pune) [50-70 minutes interview]

This year we had only 1 Technical Interview in the hiring process of ThoughtwWorks.
I was asked questions about DataStructures, OOP, Solution and Database design, Algorithms, JavaScript, Project, etc.

• (OOP and DataBase desgin questions had a major part in the interview)
  • Design OOP solution for a Library System where user can get books on rent for particular period of time with different rates and optional discount on some categories of books.
  • Design database schema for the above problem.

• • What are some important differences between Java & C++ ?
  • Difference between Interface & Abstract class ?
  • Write algorithm to solve Towers of Hanoi problem.
  • How will you find middle of a linked list ?

(As one of my project was of a JS library, they asked almost everything about JS)

• • How JS works ?
  • Async & Single threaded nature
  • Event loop
  • JavaScript Engine & NodeJS

• 100 floor building and the Eggs puzzle
• A sack has coins of 1,2 & 5 Rs. You pick a coin at random and place in one of three other sacks which are initially empty. How will you put the coins so as to keep the absolute differences between the three minimum possible at any instance. What if you don’t pick the coins randomly & already know the sequence of coins ?

Interviewers were very friendly and whole interview was of conversational nature. Try to discuss the answer with interviewers, talk about what you are doing when solving a problem on whiteboard and don’t give up on a problem too early.

Few of the students were shortlisted for the next interview round.

Round 4: HR Interview / Leadership round

(At ThoughtWorks Pune) [40-60 minutes interview]

Both the interviewers were very friendly. Questions were about my positive qualities, negative qualities, experience from my summer internship. Some questions were on leadership skills like how will you handle … situation? What did you learn from your past experiences of leading a team, etc.

Just be honest, little bit innovative in answering and talk with confidence.

Round 5: Social Justice round

(At ThoughtWorks Pune) [40-60 minutes interview]

Both the interviewers were very friendly. Whole interview revolves around discussions on certain recent social topics in the country.
Like Gender inequality, Mob lynching, LGBT community, Women reservations, etc.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a positive or negative view on a certain topic, what matters is how you discuss that with the interviewers and how do you convince your view to them.
Therefore be original with your answers and views on these topics, read recent social issues and their facts.

Just keep the interview feeling apart and try to have a normal discussion with the interviewers.

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Few important points:

• Make sure to have some good development projects.
• Good grip on Data Structures, algorithms and OOP is important.
• Keep your concepts clear.