Hiring Process Overview

The hiring process at Acko started with a Pre-Placement Talk, followed by an Online Assignment, and then two rounds of technical interviews. I'll break down each step in detail.

Pre-Placement Talk (PPT)

The PPT happened in the evening, lasting for a solid hour.

Online Assessment (OA)

After the PPT, we were directed to our labs for an online assessment, which was a coding round conducted on Smart-Browser. The OA consisted of 3 questions within a 90-minute duration. I'd rate them as one LeetCode easy, one difficult medium, and one hard.

• Question 1: This was a stack question focused on maximizing the score by removing a certain substring multiple times from a given word. I found it easy, solving it with a single, reusable function.
• Question 2: A DSU graph problem where I was given a vector of strings and had to determine if a loop could be formed by connecting words. The connection rule was that the last letter of one word matches the first letter of another, creating directed edges. Identifying loops using indegree and outdegree in DSU made this a difficult medium problem.
• Question 3: I was given an array of integers with zero values representing missing numbers. The task was to replace these zeros with any integer from 1 to 'm' such that any two consecutive numbers differed by at most 1, returning the count modulo 1e9+7. This was a really difficult question, and I only managed to complete it because I had encountered a similar problem in a previous OA. It consumed most of my time, but I passed all test cases.

Within a few hours, 13 students were shortlisted for interviews, with factors like OA performance, CGPA, and resume likely considered.

Interview Round 1

My first interview was scheduled for the next morning. I was advised to bring my laptop and phone for potential project discussions. After introductions, the interviewer showed significant interest in my project. I had integrated an ML model into a web application for campus teachers, utilizing FAISS database, BERT embeddings, Fast API, NextJS, and MongoDB. We had a fruitful 25-minute discussion and demo, which felt like a great start.

The next segment focused on Data Structures and Algorithms:

• I was asked a Dynamic Programming question similar to Unique Paths II, but with a twist: there were coins on tiles in addition to obstacles. I needed to find a path from the top-left to the bottom-right and then return to the starting point, maximizing the total coins collected. The interviewer was more interested in my thinking and approach than just the code.
• The next was a standard question: Majority Element.

These two questions took about 40 minutes, and the interviewer closely observed my thought process and the tradeoffs I explained.

The final and perhaps most crucial segment involved core subject questions. I was asked 10-12 questions covering DBMS, Distributed Systems, OOPS concepts (with a strong focus here), Development Architectures, ACID properties, indexing, scaling, sharding, and the CAP theorem. This section felt like the real game-changer.

The interview concluded after 1 hour and 25 minutes, and I felt confident, especially after the core subjects discussion. Shortly after, HR informed me that I would have a hiring manager round after lunch.

Interview Round 2

My second round was around 3:30 PM, another offline technical interview. We jumped straight into questions.

• I was first asked to explain the questions I solved in the OA, specifically the DSU problem.
• Then, I was given a 1D DP problem statement, asked to code it up, and dry-run a few test cases, which I successfully did to his satisfaction.
• Finally, there were a few HR questions. When asked about my favorite subject, I mentioned OOPS, leading to a healthy discussion on real-life use cases of OOPS.

Overall, it was a good discussion, and I was asked to wait for the results.

Outcome

About an hour later, the placement team contacted me with the result, and I was thrilled to find out I was finally selected!