Status: New Grad, B.Tech in CS from tier 2 college
Position: SDE 1 at IEM
Location: India
Date: 15th Feb, 2020

This institute hires mainly from IIT and NITs. Our institute was invited in pool campusing. There were total 5 rounds in the selection process. Out of 40 people selected in Round 1, only 3 were selected finally and luckily I am one of them. I learnt a lot from this community, this is my turn to share the experience. It will feel great for me if this post become helpful for leetcoders :-) Enjoy!

Preperation

• At the time of interview I have solved 70 Easy, 55 Medium and 7 Hard problems
• 4-5 Mock interviews on P r a m p were really helpful(it's free!)
• Focused on quality instead of solving lots of problem(quantity), even for Easy problem I used to solve it until I get the most optimized solution and used Leetcode discussions
• Mainly followed data structure and algorithm course by Willium Fiset.

Round 1
The first round was on Quantitative Aptitude, logical reasoning and general CS questions based on OOPs concept and related to OS, DBMS. Total time given was 1.30 hours with a total of 60 multiple choice questions. The CS questions were easy. Clear idea about the fundamentals concept was enough to crack this round.

Round 2
This round was focused on checking behavioural part. In all questions, a situation was given and some options were given, it was asked to choose what I will do in that given situation.

Coding Test
4 programming problems were given and total time was 1 hour. The problems were given directly from Leetcode or variation of leetcode problems. The first one was a easy one, 2 medium and the last one was hard. The hardest part was that, run time complexity was mentioned with the problem(most optimized) and we need to come up with a solution which has given time complexity in worst case. Here are the problems -

• Reverse string without effecting special characters with time complexity O(n)
• Product of array except self with time complexity O(n)
• Maximum product subarray with time complexity O(n)
• Similar to Numbers at most N given digit set problem(can't remember the complexity limit)

I have solved first 3, was not able to solve the 4th one as the given time was 1 hour. I have solved those type of poblems before here.

Technical interview
I was sure that I will be called for the technical round. After a gap of 30 min after the coding round the technical recruiter called my name. After entering the room I started to panic, they told me to have a sit and started with the usually asked question - "Tell us about yourself?". There were 2 interviewers(I will reffer P1 and P2). P1 start asking about my past projects.

Then the P2 started asking about the problems in coding round. My solutions were with them and they told me to go through the solution with some inputs they provided. I have used proper naming, like for variable which contains value upto a point I have used name max_so_far etc. The interviewers were happy to see maintainable code.

Then they started asking OOPs concepts in detail and told me to creat a subclass of a Python list so that it does not support the updating element. eg; my created subclass is List then lst = List([1,2,3,4]) then if I try to update suppose 1st index like lst[1] = 9, it should raise error(immutability in short).

Last question was - "can an abstract class be empty? If yes then what is the use of it?". I told that yes by definition a class can be empty but at that time I was not aware about the use(OOD question). They told me to wait for the result. Overall the interview went well.

Tips:

• I always try to write code(also while solving Leetcode problems) following Python's PEP 8 style guide.
• I will suggest to try always writing code which is maintainable and readable.
• Do not use any extra pointers. Suppose you can get length of a substring from left and right pointers by (right-left+1) then do not use another variable to store length.

Behavioural interview
In this round I was asked pretty common questions. Like "tell me about a time when

• "you faced technical challenge and how you have solved it? what was the outcome?",
• "you have to take the role of leading a team"
• "you helped one of your teammate"
• "how you learn new technology?"

After 1 week, they send me the offer letter with a decent package of 14 LPA for the role of Software Developer 1. Without Leetcode community, it was not possible for me to get the job, I am very thankful to this community. I am thinking about buying the premium version. Final goal yet to achieve! Thanks a lot guys :-)