Interview Experience:
During the interview, the discussion began with a deep dive into my internship project at Samsung R&D, Bangalore. The interviewer asked about potential single points of failure in the project and how I would address them. They also wanted to know the role of 'doChoreographer' frames and how these could help in identifying performance bottlenecks.
Next, the focus shifted to fundamental Data Structures and Algorithms , where I was asked about different traversal algorithms for trees and graphs, with an emphasis on their real-world applications.
The interviewer then posed two aptitude questions:
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Scooter and tires problem: You have a scooter with two tires and a third spare tire. Each tire can last for 5 km. The task was to find the maximum distance you can travel( ans : 7.5 km, think greedily).
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Weighing coins problem: You are given 10 bags of coins, with one bag weighing differently. The challenge was to determine the minimum number of weighings required to identify the odd bag(use a divide and conquer method, which results in log2(10) moves).
After these, we returned to DSA with a focus on Dijkstra's Algorithm, Bellman-Ford, and Floyd-Warshall, covering their time and space complexities. There was also a discussion about a dynamic programming problem involving directed graphs that had appeared in the SWC Advanced test.
Finally, the interview touched on core CS fundamentals like semaphores, threads, locking, critical sections, race conditions, and ways to handle them. Throughout the interview, the focus was more on problem-solving and logical thinking than on theoretical concepts.