Adobe Interview Experience | SDE 2
Summary
I attended two rounds of interviews for an SDE 2 role at Adobe, solving three DSA problems, but was not selected.
Full Experience
Round 1 (OA)
There were 2 easy - medium DSA questions which I don't remember.
Round 2 (Virtual Zoom Meet)
The interviewer asked 3 DSA questions of easy-medium-hard difficulty. Needed to write compilable code on a document (no test cases to be passed).
Question 1: Given a stream of integers with exactly a pair of duplicate integers, need to return the duplicate integer. I discussed various approaches including the most optimal using bitwise XOR operation. The interviewer was asking for in-depth properties of XOR because of which the solution holds true. I explained but the interviewer seemed not to be convinced.
Question 2: Classic House Robber question. I gave my recursive then memoized DP solution. He asked for dry run on test cases and DP table values for some cases.
Question 3: Classic N-Queens problem. The interviewer was vague on the requirements, what the method needs to return actually. Still went with the classic approach of backtracking. But the interviewer was not convinced with the code written (was incomplete due to time constraints).
Verdict: Not selected.
Interview Questions (3)
Find Duplicate Integer in Stream
Given a stream of integers that contains exactly one pair of duplicate integers, return the duplicate integer. The solution can be derived using bitwise XOR properties which cancel out non‑duplicate numbers.
House Robber Problem
Given an array of non‑negative integers representing the amount of money in each house along a street, determine the maximum amount of money you can rob without robbing two adjacent houses.
N-Queens Problem
Place N queens on an N×N chessboard such that no two queens attack each other. Return all distinct solutions or indicate a valid arrangement.