Ai Dash

Role: SDE Intern

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: December 9, 2021

Interview Type: Off-Campus, Internship

Result: Not Specified

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 1 round (Technical)

Topics Asked: Projects, Data Structures and Algorithms, Puzzles

Experience:

The candidate applied for an SDE Intern role via LinkedIn and received an interview invitation after 3-4 days. The interview was conducted on MS Teams and lasted approximately 45 minutes. The interviewer, a Data Scientist, started with introductions and then extensively discussed the candidate's projects, asking "what, why, how" questions to grill them.

A Google Doc link was shared for coding questions. The first coding question was: "Given an array of DISTINCT elements, rearrange the elements of the array in zig-zag fashion in O(n) time. The converted array should be in form a < b > c < d > e < f." The interviewer indicated they would provide the next question upon solving the current one. The second question was a puzzle: "There are 100 ropes in a bag. In each step, two rope ends are picked at random, tied together, and put back into a bag. The process is repeated until there are no free ends. What is the expected number of loops at the end of the process?"

General tips provided by the candidate included having a very good understanding of Data Structures and Algorithms, practicing enough DSA questions (LeetCode, GfG), being prepared to solve coding questions on Google Docs without an IDE, knowing everything written on the resume, and strongly preparing basics, definitions, and differences.