Total Experience: 3 years
Current Company: Product-based, large-scale startup
College: Tier-3
Branch: ECE

Round 1 – Online Assessment (HackerRank)

The test included 6 MCQs and 2 medium/hard LeetCode-style coding problems.

Problem 1:
Given an array values[], find the maximum possible even sum that can be obtained by selecting any subset of elements. Values may be negative, and selecting no elements is allowed. At least one even value exists.

Problem 2:
Given two arrays, determine the minimum number of moves required to make them identical. A move is defined as incrementing or decrementing a single digit of any element in either array. Reordering is not allowed.

Verdict: Cleared all test cases and got an interview call after 1.5 weeks.

Round 2 – DSA Round

The round started with a brief introduction (10 minutes).
The interviewer then shared a HackerRank link containing two problems.

Problem 1:
An overlapping-intervals problem. I solved it in ~20 minutes.

After that, the interviewer added a surprise question due to my ECE background:
Perform arithmetic operations without using arithmetic operators.
I discussed bitwise-based approaches and was able to convey partial ideas, but not the full solution. This took another 30 minutes.

Next, we moved on to the actual second DSA problem, which was a graph traversal question—fairly hard. The interviewer asked only for the approach. I explained how I would use BFS/Dijkstra along with the reasoning, and they seemed satisfied.

Verdict: Received a call within 10 minutes to rejoin the link for the next round.

Round 3

The problem was:

You are given multiple transactions in the form A B 100, meaning A paid 100 on behalf of B. You need to compute the minimum number of transactions required to settle all accounts so everyone’s net balance becomes zero.

I tried clarifying the expected direction, but the interviewer was not responding to follow-up questions. I explained my thought process and then implemented the approach as asked. Toward the end, the interviewer mentioned my logical reasoning was OK but didn’t seem satisfied with the solution overall. I asked about the coding part, and he said HR would share the feedback.

Verdict: Received a rejection email the same evening.