Uber

I participated in the Uber Software Engineer Intern recruitment process through my college. The opportunity was part of the on-campus placement process, and after registering for the drive, I was invited to the online assessment. The OA was mainly focused on coding and DSA. The questions covered common areas such as arrays, strings, hashing, and data structures. The difficulty wasn't completely crazy, but the time limit made the assessment fairly intense. I spent a little too much time on one problem trying to optimize my initial approach, which left me with less time for the remaining questions. I submitted the assessment and waited for the shortlist. After the OA, I was shortlisted for the technical interview stage. The interviews were largely focused on problem-solving rather than lengthy theoretical questions. The first technical round started with a quick introduction and then moved straight into coding. I was given an array-based problem and was asked to explain multiple approaches before writing the implementation. I first described a brute-force solution and then optimized it using a suitable data structure. The interviewer also asked several follow-ups involving edge cases and complexity. The second problem was based on a binary tree. I was able to identify the traversal required and explained the recursive approach. While coding, however, I made a small mistake and had to spend some time debugging it. I eventually corrected the issue, but a significant amount of time had already been consumed. The next round was more challenging. I received a graph-based problem where the initial approach seemed fairly straightforward, but additional constraints changed the way I had to think about the solution. I spent quite some time exploring different possibilities before settling on an approach. I could explain the idea and complexity, but I wasn't able to implement the complete solution as cleanly as I wanted. There was also a short discussion around my projects. The interviewer asked about the architecture of one of my projects, my contribution, and why I had selected particular technologies. This part was relatively comfortable because I was discussing things I had actually worked on. The interviews were quite interactive, with the interviewer continuously asking follow-ups instead of simply waiting for the final answer. They were interested in how I approached an unfamiliar problem, how I handled constraints, and whether I could recognize when an initial solution wasn't going to work. After completing the interview process, I received the final update that I had not been selected for the Software Engineer Intern position. Although the result was disappointing, the Uber process was useful because it exposed a weakness in my preparation: I could generally identify the right DSA direction, but under interview pressure, implementing the solution quickly and accurately was still a challenge. The experience made me focus more on timed problem solving, debugging, and practicing unfamiliar variations rather than only solving standard DSA patterns. Overall, my Uber campus experience was On-Campus Application → OA → Technical Interviews → Rejected. There was no offer in my case, but reaching the technical stage gave me a good understanding of the kind of problem-solving expected during the process.