Why I didn’t go for lucrative offers of Ibibo/ZoomCar and decided to go for an entrepreneurial journey in the current Startup I am working for

ZoomCar Interview experience:
Few weeks ago, I got a mail from Zoomcar HR saying that the CTO of the company wanted to have In-person interview with me.I was a bit shocked and confused, Since Zoomcar is now mid-size startup ,having a tech-team of 50+ people.But since the CTO directly called me for the interview so I decided to go and visit him.

First Round with CTO
Duration : 1 hour 30 min

1. General Questions about the key roles which I am playing currently like leading tech team in the current startup i am working for, advising startups and advising students on programming.
2. How I built the Bi-directional syncing architecture in my current startup, then he put some constraints to improve it to make scalable and reliable.
3. How I build the Muliti-tenant server architecture in current working startup.
4. We discussed on haproxy,Master-Slave configuration,Replication and redundancy.
5. Basic Questions on Rails architecture and REST .
6. Basic Algo Questions :
   a.Implement queue using two stacks ,in the most optimized way possible.
   b.Remove duplicates from linked list .
7. Basic questions from Ruby about block , proc and lambda.

Second Round with Technical Lead
Duration : 1 hour

TL entered into the conference room and went through my resume .

1. He asked me about my Google interview experience.
2. We discussed about my college project Search engine. He asked about the data structure to store index and algorithms involved in building search index , he also asked me about how google stores their index on multiple machines .
3. He asked me how to build a spell correction if there were no dictionary, then he asked me to implement Trie . Finally we discussed on how Google spell correction works , discussion went on bayes theorem and NLP.
4. He also asked me a few more data structures question on hashmap,stacks,Linkedlist,Heap,B-tree etc.
5. We also had a discussion about Zoomcar server-side architecture .
6. He also asked me some advance ruby concepts like metaprogramming , modules , etc

Finally, CTO entered the conference room and asked me about my expectation, since I hadn’t prepared my mind to go and crack the interview, so I roughly gave them one BIG number, next day I got a call from HR saying that they are ready to hire me for the same.

BOOM!

IBIBO Interview experience :
All interviews were taken by Tech Head of the product team.

First Round :

1. Which is more secure get or post.
2. Discussion on REST architecture.
3. What are the different dynamic ways to call a function.
4. How modules and Class store in memory.
5. Discussion on meta-programming in ruby.
6. Find the missing and repetition number in an array.
7. Discussion on Bi-directional sync architecture apps and server.

Second Round :

1. Asynchronous function call in ruby.
2. Threads in ruby.
3. Modules and Classes in ruby.
4. Symbol and variable in ruby and python.
5. How Zookeeper works.
6. How to delete nodes in a heap.

Third Round :

1. Closures in javascript.
2. Basic Jquery questions.
3. Single and Multi-column index in mysql
4. How prototype works in javascript.
5. Active Record and Action controller in Rails.
6. Discussion on my college project Search Engine.
7. The Interviewer also told me about work culture at ibibo office .

Fourth Round :
Build a Rails app for authentication of users which consumes Rest api and oauth2 implementation. There were some other constraints also in terms of UI like page should refresh and UI should be attractive etc.

After being interviewed and getting feedbacks from HR of both the companies, I was bit confused whether I should go for these companies or I should work for growing startup , So I had a talk with my founder over drinks that I really wanted to groom myself as an entrepreneur , but if i join any of them , I will grow as a developer.

So my founder gave me an opportunity to groom as co-founder and lead in tech, Operations and represent the company to investors for fund raising.

So I recommend all the students that you should invest early stage of your career working amongst passionate people in a small companies where you will be have more responsibilities and you will be able to prove yourself that will help you in grooming more compare to other big tech companies.

You can know more about me at www.codedoctorx.com, Happy Coding 🙂