At the end of October 2022, Visa conducted an on-campus recruitment drive for SDE – 1 interns.
Online coding Round: It consists of 2 normal leetcode style questions. The online coding test was conducted on the hackerrank platform.
Problem 1: Maximum Score: An interviewer at HackerRank recently came up with an interesting problem for the candidates.
- Given an array arr of n integers, start with a score of 0. In one operation, one element of the array is chosen, and its value is added to the score. The element is replaced by the integer ceiling of one-third of its value. For example, if the element is 10, then 10 is added to the score and the element is replaced by ceil(10/3)=4.
- The task is to find the maximum possible score after koperations.
Problem 2: Purchase optimization: (Time limit: 60 mins)Alex is shopping at Ozone Galleria Mall. There is a dedicated cubicle for a type of product at the shopping center. All the products sold at the ith cubicle are priced the same, denoted by prices[i]. The cubicles are arranged such that the price of the products sold at each cubicle are in non-decreasing order.
- Several queries would be asked about the problem. In each query, the cubicle number Alex is initially standing at, and the amount of money Alex has is given, and Alex can travel in the right direction visiting from the current cubicle to the last cubicle. Alex may buy at most one item from any cubicle visited, but the total cost of the purchase must not exceed the amount Alex has. Report the maximum number of products that can be purchased for each query.
- More formally, given an array of n integers, prices, where prices[i] denotes the price of the product sold in the ith cubicle. The array prices are in non-decreasing order (i.e., the price[i]≤ price[i+1]), and q queries need to be processed. For each query, two integers are given:
pos: Alex’s initial position ⚫ amount: the amount of money Alex has - Alex needs to visit each cubicle from number pos to n, purchasing at most one product from each cubicle. For each query, the goal is to find the maximum number of products that Alex can buy.
I solved both problems within 33 minutes. People who solved both problems partially or completely within 45 minutes were normally shortlisted for the second round.
Round 2: My interview was conducted on Microsoft Teams and was conducted by the Director of Visa Bangalore.
- There was no introduction, he simply asked my name and started the interview.
- He started the interview by asking about resilient systems.
- And asked me to design a resilient system for Visa. He asked me to plan different solutions in case of server crashes. This took about 35 – 40 minutes.
- Then he asked me to write a MySQL query by using the have clause, cause I have mentioned MySQL in my resume.
- After that, he asked me about SQL and No SQL databases.
- Different examples, scaling, asked me about situations in which we will use a SQL database and the situation in which we will use a NO SQL database.
And in the final 5 minutes of the interview, I was asked to code a program to remove space from a string and reverse a string.