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# Interview Experience *Note:** This interview was for a Summer Internship. The candidate was a GRiD winner, which influenced the process. ## Round 0: Written Round **Type:** Written Round **Status:** Skipped. Not required for GRiD winners. ## Round 1: Technical **Difficulty:** Decent level (Easy for those with good LeetCode practice). **LeetCode Difficulty:** Question 1: Medium, Question 2: Medium. **Topics:** Binary Search, Backtracking, DFS. **Experience:** The interviewer was friendly and focused solely on DSA. After a brief 2-minute introduction, the session moved straight to coding questions. The interviewer checked the resume while the candidate was coding but did not ask questions about it. ### Question 1: Koko Eating Bananas **Link:** [LeetCode - Koko Eating Bananas](https://leetcode.com/problems/koko-eating-bananas/description/) **Discussion:** The candidate initially proposed a brute-force approach with $O(k \cdot n)$ complexity by incrementing $k$ from 1. After being prompted to optimize and analyzing the time complexity, the candidate realized $k$ is bounded by the maximum element of the array. This led to a Binary Search solution with $O(n \cdot \log(\text{max}))$ complexity. The interviewer was satisfied with the written code. ### Question 2: Word Search **Link:** [LeetCode - Word Search](https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/description/) **Discussion:** The candidate provided the approach quickly and wrote the code in Python. The interviewer pointed out that using a set to store visited indices might add $O(\log n)$ time complexity during backtracking (depending on implementation/language specifics). The candidate switched to a dictionary/hash map approach, which satisfied the interviewer. ## Round 2: Technical **Difficulty:** Hard. **LeetCode Difficulty:** Question 1: Medium, Question 2: Hard. **Topics:** Multisource BFS, Linked Lists. **Experience:** The interviewer was friendly and skipped the resume review to start the technical questions immediately. ### Question 1: Rotting Oranges **Link:** [LeetCode - Rotting Oranges](https://leetcode.com/problems/rotting-oranges/description/) **Discussion:** The interviewer initially mentioned the Word Search problem from the previous round as a lead-in but then pivoted to this problem as a "follow-up." The candidate initially tried DFS and standard BFS, which were not optimal. Eventually, the candidate realized that pushing all initial sources into the queue simultaneously (Multi-Source BFS) was the correct approach and implemented it. ### Question 2: Reverse Nodes in k-Group **Link:** [LeetCode - Reverse Nodes in k-Group](https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/description/) **Discussion:** With only 10 minutes remaining, the candidate was given this Hard-level problem. The candidate proposed an $O(1)$ space solution. Despite a brief struggle with the basic linked list reversal logic, the candidate completed the code and successfully dry-ran the edge cases. ## Overall Experience The candidate felt the process was manageable with preparation like the Blind 75 list. The interviewers were friendly and the environment was not intimidating.