ZOHO Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus) 2023

This was an on-premises hiring process in Chennai. The hiring was for SDE, QA, and DevOps. There were around 400+ candidates ( a lot more than I expected ).

Rounds 1 & 2 were done the first day and a few days later rounds 3, 4 & 5.

Round-1

• The first round comprised a of total 25 questions including 15 aptitude and 10 code output and error-based (Test Duration: 1.5 hours).
• The quantitative aptitude part was easy, it included questions like finding stream speed, given time for the boat to travel some distance upstream and downstream. Final distance from the start after traveling to given distances in a given direction.
• Next, there were 10 questions in which a code was given in C language and you had to either predict the output or tell the error in code. This part was a little tricky, you have to be aware of the working of static variables and recursive functions.
• There was no MCQ, you have to write your answers on the answers sheet provided.

Suggestion: Try to give a C quiz from GFG or any other platform, this will help a lot.

Round-2 (Programming DSA)

• There were 6 DSA questions. You have to write the solution code on their system and have to explain the same to the invigilators. You can select a language and IDE of your choice. I wrote it in C++ on an online compiler.
• The first three questions were easy. They were :
  1. Given an array nums containing n distinct numbers in the range [0, n], return the only number in the range that is missing from the array.
  2. Given a string column title that represents the column title as appears in an Excel sheet, return its corresponding column number.
  3. There were two strings given and you have to modify the second string according to some rules in comparison to the first string.
• The next three questions were from easy to medium. They were:
  1. Check whether a string is a subsequence of another or not.
  2. Letter combination of a phone number. Given a string containing digits 0-9, return all possible letter combinations. Letter combination of a phone number.
  3. It was a stack question. It was similar to Decode a string recursively encoded as count followed by substring.

Tip: Since you don’t have to worry about all the edge cases, take your time to write clean and easily understandable code. Because at last you have to explain it to the invigilators and they will give you a mark.

Round-3 (Programming System Design)

• This round I found the toughest. There was a 4-page long system design question to create an employee and parking management system. I doubt if any of the candidates was able to complete it.
• There were a total of 11 parts of the question out of which I was able to complete only 7 parts. ( Luckily got selected for the next round ). I guess completing 5 parts was enough to get qualified.
• Again you can select a language and IDE of your choice. After completing any parts you have to explain it to the invigilators and they will mark you accordingly.

Round-4 ( Technical Interview )

• It was dependent on the interviewer what to ask. My interviewer asked me everything from my CV only.
• He opened my project’s Github repos and started asking me from there about the annotations used, internal working, flows, advantages, etc.
• He also asked questions related to the languages and tools I mentioned. Like what difference you feel between C++ and Java, what is MQ, and why and where you used it.
• He was checking my thought process and was not asking anything that you have to remember like terms and definitions.

Round-5 ( HR Interview )

• Very basic, nothing special. You don’t have to worry about this round at least. They just ask you about overall experience and salary expectations. ( Sadly my expectation was more than their budget )

Overall, the whole process tests your thinking skills rather than your memorizing ability. I hope you liked the experience if you like it don’t forget to comment.

Thanks for reading.