Round – 1: Trilogy Innovation had come on campus on 2 Aug, and conducted its coding round on the interview bit platform. There were around 450 students who gave the round. There were 4 questions. I don’t exactly remember the question.
- First was an application of hamming distance algorithm ( Bit Manipulation).
- The second was something related to the segment tree. (Little bit modification in the template code of segment tree was to be done).
- A 3-d dp was questioned. It was simple as the transition state was easy to identify and constraints were small so memorized solution got accepted.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/escape-the-spreading-fire/ (Little bit of modification of this question, but the idea was similar).
After the coding round, 12 students got selected,
Round – 2:
- We then proceeded to the next round which was the CCAT (aptitude test) in which there were 50 questions each of 1 mark, and the cut-off for the clearance for this round was 40.
- Mathematical reasoning questions, logical thinking questions, and some language aptitude questions were there.
- The format of this test was similar to the NTSE exam. I was the only one who got 50 on 50 for this round.
After the aptitude round, 11 students got selected.
Round – 3: (R0) round (Telephonic Round): A zoom call was done.
- Questions on projects were asked.
- All the projects were discussed. The interviewer has gone in depth with the frameworks used and the idea behind the implementation.
- Code was made to change in the project and asked what will happen he this approach is done.
- How much time with it takes to enter 10k records? How to optimize the current approach used.
- You need to know everything to the depth of your project. As in my project, I am using Django, so I was asked, which middleware is being mostly used by your project. What is the scope of advancement of this project?
- Don’t leave even a single project mentioned in your resume to read carefully. This interview lasted for 45 minutes. This round was taken by SDE- 2 of the company.
After this round 4 students got selected.
Round – 4: (R1) round : (Technical Round) This round was the toughest.
- I was asked the first 20 min the question on the project and some operating systems questions.
- Then I was told that a question would be given I need to tell the approach and code it. The question was on graph + dp.
- I remembered the question is vague. There was an undirected tree, in which every node was having some value either +ve or -ve, and for every node, I need to calculate the maximum sum of the tree including that node. This was to be done in O(n). I first told my brute force approach that for each node, do dos on the whole tree, and which returns return max(0, sum_of_value(node)). In This was, go for all the nodes, The complexity was O(n^2).
- I was told to optimize it. I was able to optimize it after some time, that we will firstly precompute the subtree sum of each node that for each node we can use this array to find the sum. I was able to create some relation/ equation for each node, which passed the test cases.
- Then he asked about me and my passion and asked me if I had any questions for him.
This round lasted for 1 hr 30 min and was taken by SDE-3 of the company, After this round 3 students got selected.
Round – 5: (R2) (Vp Round more often system design)). This round also started with a brief description of projects.
- I was given a real-life problem and then I had to tell which ways all can solve the problem.
- I was asked to pseudo-code the low-level design for the same problem.
- The problem was like you want to build a navigation system for your library which has 10 robots in working state.
- There is some physically challenged student whom your institute wants to provide some benefits of reading in the library.
- You have to design a navigation system for the robots such that if a student is sitting at his desk, he queries the system to get this book from this shelf. And one of the robots should bring that book to the student and returns it to its original position.
- I had to first tell all the required conditions, what the can robot be called, and what issues would be there while tracking the path, as there can be multiple paths to travel, and since many robots, so they can collide also. I need to tell the approach and code it.
- I need to tell what framework can benefit me, what database to use, what to store in my database, and all the other things.
This round lasted for an hour and was taken by the Vice president of the company. After this round 1 student got selected. In the evening I received a call from HR and received the contingent offer letter.
After this last round was done
Round – 6: (PCCAT final round): This was a whole similar to Round- 2, but it was a live protocoled exam. This difficulty of the question was huge. You have two chances to clear this round. One now, and one after 6 months. In this also cut-off was 40.
Tips: Prepare for the worst to go on, don’t leave CS fundamentals, or low-level system design.
Verdict: Selected