Recently, Rocket India came to our campus to hire interns for their Mr Cooper subdivision.

It consisted of three rounds:

Online Test

The online test was held on hackerearth and had 27 questions of which 3 were coding and 1 was SQL, rest were aptitude.

First coding question was about finding the maximum possible number of words in a string, with the list of words supplied prior. It was easily solvable using a two-pointer approach.

Second question involved some basic transformation on an array and then calculating the number of inversions in this new array. Only half the test-cases passed with the brute force approach, you needed to perform modified merge sort to completely solve it.
Similar to - https://leetcode.com/problems/count-of-smaller-numbers-after-self/description/

Third question was similar to this one: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-fuel-cost-to-report-to-the-capital/description/

The SQL question covered joins, group by, distinct, and aggregates.

Around 70/200 students were chosen from this round.

"Grand Coding Round"

After this, the company visited the campus directly and hosted a "grand coding round", there was honestly nothing grand about this round.

The task was to design a Library Management System:

• ER diagram
• System architecture
• SQL query
• OOP implementation

This was presented as a design-focused round where “there is no correct solution” and “we care about your approach.” On the surface, this looked like a solid attempt to evaluate real engineering skills.

At the end though, there was no proper evaluation. All of the design work was done on a paper, at the end of the time limit they just took the paper and left without even asking us to explain our approach or design choices.

The code was an even sadder story, we didn't even get to submit it. The guy who evaluated mine just asked me to explain it, and while i was doing it line-by-line, explaining my design decisions, he was just casually nodding along while looking at his phone.

Even more puzzlingly, they somehow evaluated the papers of around 60 students in 15 minutes and then shortlisted just TWO candidates for the interview stage.

Interview Stage

Not shortlisted.

The process started off reasonable but broke down in the most important round.

A design round without discussion defeats its own purpose. If candidates are not given the chance to explain trade-offs, assumptions, or decisions, then the evaluation becomes arbitrary and nothing more than a test of who can write and draw the most pretty looking bullshit.