Cadence

Role: Software Engineer I (C/C++)

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: March 7, 2021

Interview Type: Off-Campus, Full-Time

Result: Accepted - Got the Offer

Difficulty: Not Specified

Rounds: 4 Technical Rounds + 2 HR Rounds

Topics Asked: C++, Data Structures, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Object-Oriented Programming

Experience:

The candidate, with 6 months of experience, interviewed for a Software Engineer I (C/C++) position in Bangalore. The process included a recruiter call, followed by four technical online interviews and two HR discussions.

Round 1 (Online - 1 hour): Interviewer from Bangalore. Questions included:

• Height of a Binary Tree.
• Determine whether a Binary Tree is height-balanced (O(n) implementation required).
• Minimum Coin Change DP issue.
• Write Class, Integer Pointer, Constructor, Destructor, Copy Constructor, Assignment Operator in C++.

Round 2 (Online - 1 hour): Interviewer from Mountain View, California. Included a significant discussion (20 min) about the candidate's CV, projects, internships, and past experiences. Technical questions were:

• Virtual Function and Virtual Table Concepts in C++, as well as Polymorphism.
• Given an infinite stream of integers, print the maximum three integers in the stream as you progress along with their position in the stream each time.
• Function( T &&x ) - What does && represent here? (Note: not the logical AND operator).

Round 3 (Online - 1 hour): Interviewer from San Jose, California. Involved a 30-minute discussion on CV, projects, internships, past experiences, and academic courses. Coding questions were:

• Reverse a linked list.
• Print leaf nodes of a tree in reverse order (Hint: Use reverse inorder traversal).
• Multithreading in C++.
• Synchronization Concepts of OS (mutex).

Round 4 (Online - 1 hour): Interviewer from San Jose, California. Started with a 10-minute discussion on CV, projects, internships, and academic courses. Technical questions included:

• Reference Count, Smart Pointers, Garbage Collection (C++ and Java, along with internal working of GC algorithm in Java).
• Add/Deleting at the beginning, Add/Deleting at the end in a singly linked list in O(1) for each function, without changing the node structure (Hint: Make it a circular linked list).

HR Discussions (2 rounds, 10-15 min each): General HR questions.

Overall Experience: The candidate received an offer.