The whole process consisted of one coding round and 3 interview rounds. Due to covid, the whole process was virtual.
Online Coding Round: It was conducted on Intervue and consisted of 4 questions to be solved in 90 mins. 3 of them were:
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-operations-required-make-row-column-matrix-equals/amp/.
- https://www.interviewbit.com/problems/next-smallest-palindrome/.
- https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/math/number-theory/totient-function/practice-problems/algorithm/kasrioo-145db44b/editorial/.
I had solved 3 problems completely. Folks who had solved 2.5 were also shortlisted. Total 25 were shortlisted for the interviews.
Round 1: The interviewer started with a brief introduction of himself and asked me to do the same.
- He then started probing me on my Django project asking about various functionalities of templates in Django.
- He then asked me to write a SQL query, as I had mentioned MySQL in my resume. It was based on basic joins.
- Next, he gave me a question https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/in-place-convert-a-given-binary-tree-to-doubly-linked-list/. I explained my recursive approach, he was satisfied and asked me to code it.
- He then moved on to this problem https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/anagram-substring-search-search-permutations/amp/. I first gave the brute force approach. He was amused and asked me to code the brute force(generating all subarrays). He then ran it on a few test cases and it worked fine. He now asked me to optimize it. I then told about the sliding window approach along with using hashmaps.
- He then asked me about the details of the implementation of maps in C++ STL.
- Finally, after being satisfied, he asked me to code my approach. He was quite satisfied by it.
- He then moved on to the next problem and said that this is the last problem. The problem was https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maximum-product-subarray/amp/. As usual, I started with brute force, and he told me to optimize it. I then came up with a DP solution. He wasn’t satisfied with my explanation and asked me to explain the intuition behind it. I explained it to him using various test cases, the ones where array has zeros and negative numbers. He finally agreed and asked me to code it in just 5 mins while explaining code simultaneously. I did that in much lesser time and he ran the code on some test cases and was satisfied.
- In the end, he asked if I had any questions for him. I asked about his journey in Zomato so far. He patiently explained it and ended the interview on a good note.
Finally, 9 students were given the offer including me.