Dp World

Role: SDE-1 Backend

College: Normal Private College (Tier 3/4)

Interview Date: Sept 2021

Interview Type: Virtual (Referral)

Result: Rejected

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: 2 rounds

Topics Asked: Competitive Programming, Data Structures, Algorithms (BFS, cycle detection, Linked List manipulation), O(1) space complexity

Experience:

The candidate, a 2020 graduate with experience at Infosys as a Digital Specialist Engineer, applied through a referral for a Java Backend Dev Role. The company emphasized solutions with O(1) space complexity.

Round 1: Online Coding Assessment (HackerRank - 90 min)

• 3 Coding questions: 1 Easy, 1 Easy-Medium, 1 Medium, based on Competitive Programming.

Round 2: DSA Round 1 (Face2Face Virtual - 1 hour)

• Brief Introduction.
• Q1: Given a matrix of arrows, check whether from Top-Left you can reach bottom down.
  • Candidate's Approach 1: BFS with a visited array. Interviewer's feedback: "Extra space Not allowed."
  • Candidate's Approach 2: BFS, marking visited cells in the given matrix with '#'. Interviewer's feedback: "Changing the input not allowed."
  • Candidate struggled to find a solution without extra space or modifying the input. Later, the candidate thought of a solution using a counter to detect cycles, returning false if the counter exceeded N*M.
• Q2: LeetCode - Reorder List (He wanted a specific approach for this linked list problem).
• Q3: LeetCode - Add Two Numbers II.

The candidate was rejected, feeling bad for not being able to solve a single question properly despite solving many problems on LeetCode and other platforms.