Background:-
- Education: NIT Jamshedpur
- Experience: 0 yrs
- Internship: 3 months Intern @Kohli Media LLP. as Entry-Level Frontend Developer (In 2nd yr of my B.Tech. Grad.)
Job Description:-
- Company: Yellow.ai
- Title/Level: Software Development Engineer-I
- Offers: FTE + 6 months Intern
- Location: Bangalore
- Eligibility Criteria: 7.5 CGPA and above
Selection Process:-
Consisted of 3 rounds:
- Round 1 — Online Assessment
- Round 2 — Technical Interview
- Round 3 — Managerial Interview
Round 1:
- Online Assessment on Hackerank platform consisting of 15 aptitude questions and 2 coding questions of easy—medium level difficulty.
- Given time around 90 mins.
- Around ~50 students were shortlisted for the 1st round of interviews.
Round 2: [45–50 mins]
- It was conducted on the Google Meet platform where you have to share your screen. The interviewer first introduced himself followed by me. He was in an SDE-1 role in the company.
- Then first I was asked to explain my project. I explained it in a WH-word format (What is the project, What are tech-stacks used in the project, Why did I choose those tech-stacks, Which use-case this project tackles in real life, Where are this project lacking). [This took me 15mins]
- Then I was asked questions related to basic OOPs concepts. [This goes around 10 mins]
- Then I was given an easy — medium level Tree problem from LeetCode to solve, i.e, Do an In-Order traversal by using loop method (don’t use recursion). It took me some time to get through the complete code as in most of the cases I use recursion in this type of problem, but I was able to solve it with all the edge cases possible. [Till this question 40 mins were already gone]
- Then I was given an easy — medium level DP problem to solve, i.e, To eat the maximum no. of Candies kept on the 4 corners of the table if there is a fixed pattern to pick the candies from all the corners of the table. Because time was less, I was only asked to explain my approach that how I’ll solve this problem. Initially, it took me time to understand the problem and after 2–3 mins I was told to leave this due to time constraints.
- Then I was asked to ask questions about the company if I have. I asked him a few questions about how he’s doing so far in the company and tried to know more about how things work in the company.
Round 3: [55–60 mins]
- This time it was different. I thought it would be a technical round too, but it was a managerial round.
- It started the same as Round — 2. He was in a Hiring Manager role in the company.
- Then first I was asked to explain my project again. But this time it took more time because of the cross-questions by the interviewer, For approximately 40 mins we were having a discussion on the projects and mainly how can I improve it.
- Then I was asked some behavioral & situational questions like, What will you do if you and your colleague have different approaches to a problem and he’s insisting to solve by his own method; What will you do if you got assigned to a project which is not in your interests, but then you came to know there is also an ongoing project in which your interests and skills lie. I was able to convince him with my answers.
- Then I was asked to ask questions about the company if I have. I asked him a few questions about how he’s doing so far in the company and this time I asked about an employee’s growth in the company.
6 students were in the final selection.
Importance of Projects and Internships:-
- I personally felt that yellow.ai was more into projects and your approach to solve problems.
- In all the rounds they hadn’t asked me about my previous internship, so I can’t say about it. However, it always depends on company to company.
Suggestions/Advice:-
- For Yollow.ai it was fine if you are not able to reach the final result, instead they were actually interested in your process, approach and thinking, like how optimized it is.
- So, make sure that you master the basic concepts of CS fundamentals (OOPs, OS & DBMS), and always brush-up your skill to explain the approach from brute-force to optimal by solving DSA problems over and over, specially standard ones.
- If you don’t have any internships then its better if you keep at-least two full stack projects on your resume. Like I was having one MERN (full stack) project and one API integration project.
Resources which I followed:-
- DSA Practice — GFG, LeetCode, and Striver’s 180 sheets.
- OOPs — Love Babbar’s OOPs (Playlist & Notes), and
- OS — Love Babbar’s OS (Playlist & Notes)
- DBMS — Gate Smasher’s DBMS Notes