4 rounds = Hacker rank Assessment + 2 x Technical Interviews + HR Round

Round 1: Hacker Rank Assessment

1. Hydrate Nodes - Tree/Graph Based
2. Maximum Length of Subset with Positive Product (Standard Problem)
3. Weird Stock - Ad Hoc Maths

Managed to solve all 3 problems. Just the basic test cases needed to be passed.(3-5 in number)

P1: An inverted apple tree with two branches arising from each node is given. Basically a binary tree. An apple can be normal, nearly overhydrated or neary underhydrated. Penalties for overhydrated and underhydrated apple are given. You have to water just one node in tree such that the sum of overhydrated and underhydrated penalties for the whole tree is minimized. Input for tree is given in the form of a parent array and another array denotes the status of each of the apple node as 0 (neutral), -1 (under hydrated) and 1 (overhydrated).

P2 and P3 :: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/678862/Arcesium-or-OA-2020-or-Positive-Product-and-Weird-Stock

Round 2: Technical Interview I

This round was taken by a Sr. Software Engineer.

1. Brief Introduction
2. Describe the Favourite Project that you have worked on. (5-10 mins) Then he cross questioned on some of the decisions made along the way and why they were made.
3. DSA Problem - Tell if a given array of numbers is strictly increasing, strictly decreasing, increasing then decreasing or decreasing then increasing.
   1. I gave the brute force approach first. He wanted me to optimise it.
   2. I gave a binary search based (O(log n)) approach. He asked me to code it.
   3. He then asked me to further optimise it and give O(1) approach. I had no idea how to do it in O(1), but after thinking a lot, I told him that we’ll need to guarantee that either of these four cases occurs, only then we can compare first two and last two elements to determine the order of the array. If the array is neither of these 4 cases, then this approach won’t work.
4. What is a process?
5. What is a thread?
6. How is a process different from thread?
7. Does a parent process share memory with its thread?

I asked them 3 questions in the end regarding the work culture and the role.

Round 3 : Technical Interview II

Taken by 2 Sr. SDEs.

1. Project Description and basic questions regarding decisions made along the way
2. DSA - Rot all Oranges (Optimised Approach + Code) on Hackerrank Code Share Page
3. Real life uses of LRU and MRU
4. What is an interface?
5. How are interfaces implemented in C++?

I asked them 3 questions in the end regarding the work culture and the role.

Round 4 : HR Round

Questions on aspirations and why I want to leave my current company, why I want to join Arcesium and Salary expectations.

I asked her 2 questions in the end regarding the role.