All my Interviews after being Laid Off || Fourth Interview || Decentro || Bengaluru || SDE 1
Summary
This post details my fourth interview experience after being laid off, specifically with Decentro for an SDE-1 Backend role in Bengaluru. I went through two rounds, discussing DSA problems like Valid Parentheses and Rotten Oranges, along with DBMS and REST API concepts. Unfortunately, I received a negative outcome, which I somewhat anticipated due to a disagreement with the interviewer's approach on one of the problems.
Full Experience
Hi all, I'm sharing my fourth interview experience after being laid-off. I had around 1 year and 4 months of experience before my layoff, and the situation was horrific, especially since I'd lost touch with DSA. After taking a day to cool down, I created accounts on every popular job board and took a LinkedIn Premium trial for a month.
I applied to Decentro on Wellfound and got a call after a week for an SDE-1 Backend position in Bengaluru.
1st Round
This round covered:
- DBMS concepts
- Valid Parentheses
- Typical behavioral questions
In my opinion, the interviewer wasn't a very technical person; they seemed to be just collecting my answers in a document. I received a call after two days for Round 2.
2nd Round
This round included:
- Rotten Oranges: I explained my approach and dry-ran it, which I believed was correct. However, the interviewer insisted on using their approach, even though it didn't contribute to bringing down the time or space complexity. Too much time was wasted on this question.
- Differences between POST, PUT, PATCH
- REST APIs
- Indexing in DBMS
Feedback
It came back negative, which I somehow knew it would. I've since come to a self-realization that perhaps it's a positive thing I wasn't selected for a team where my ideas aren't heard.
Interview Questions (3)
Given a string s containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. An input string is valid if:
- Open brackets must be closed by the same type of brackets.
- Open brackets must be closed in the correct order.
- Every close bracket has a corresponding open bracket of the same type.
You are given an m x n grid where each cell can have one of three values:
0representing an empty cell,1representing a fresh orange, or2representing a rotten orange.
Every minute, any fresh orange that is 4-directionally adjacent to a rotten orange becomes rotten.
Return the minimum number of minutes that must elapse until no fresh oranges remain. If this is impossible, return -1.
Explain the differences, appropriate use cases, and idempotency characteristics of the HTTP methods POST, PUT, and PATCH.