Application Method:
Applied through a staffing agency.

Round-1 (15-30 min): Indihood Recruiter Connect

• Purpose: To assess cultural fit, gauge knowledge about Indihood, and verify if the candidate has reviewed the job description.
• Questions: Why do you want to switch jobs, and what do you know about Indihood?
• Outcome: Went well.

Round-2 (60 min): Online Assessment

• Format:
  1. Three subjective questions (20 min each).
  2. Given code snippets for time complexity analysis, debugging, and error fixing.
• Outcome: Solved 100% of the problems successfully.

Round-3 (60 min): Technical Interview-1

• Questions:
  1. Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal
  2. Find Median from Data Stream
• Outcome: Provided optimal solutions and coded them. I would rate this as a Strong Hire.

Round-4 (60+30 min): Technical Interview-2 (Extended by 30 min)

• Question:
  • The likability of a YouTuber is defined as the maximum value of L such that the given YouTuber has posted at least L videos that have each been liked at least L*1000 times. Given the videos and the number of likes for each video, return the likability of a YouTuber.
  • Approach: Discussed and drafted the problem with input and output. We discussed 6-7 approaches with complexity for both sorted and unsorted input arrays. Coded an optimal approach using binary search.
• Additional Discussion:
  • Internal workings of HashMap
  • Collision handling
  • Array size increase
  • Handling scenarios where one node gets all keys
  • Discussion on the most impactful project
• Outcome: I would rate this as a Strong Hire.

Round-5 (60 min): Technical Interview-3

• Questions:
  1. Question: Consider different numbers which can be represented in the form of (2^x)(3^y)(5^z) where x, y, z ≥ 0. Get the first n numbers following this pattern.
     • Approach: Used a heap. After discussing the approach and complexity analysis, the interviewer was satisfied and moved to the next problem without asking to code it.
  2. Question: There are n people all doing handshakes in a circle. Constraints:
     • All people must handshake.
     • All people are doing handshakes parallelly.
     • No overlapping handshakes.
     • Approach: Dry run with different n values up to 8. Identified the pattern as Catalan numbers.
       • For n = odd => 0
       • For n = 2 => 1
       • For n = 4 => 2
       • For n = 6 => 5
       • For n = 8 => 14.
     • Outcome: Coded the Catalan number approach. The interviewer was expecting a solution without using the Catalan number formula, which I couldn't code.
• Outcome: Rejected due to the last question of the final round.

Final Verdict:
Unfortunately, I was rejected due to the last question in the final round. It was very disheartening to miss from so close, but life happens.