IDFC First bank | Tech Lead | Interview experience | Rejected
Summary
I interviewed for a Tech Lead position at IDFC First Bank in Bengaluru, cleared the first coding round but was rejected after a second round that required solving the Employee Free Time problem.
Full Experience
I recently interviewed at IDFC First bank (Bengaluru) for the position of tech lead. Applied on LinkedIn, and got callback for in-office hiring drive. The experience was same as described in this post.
For the 1st round of coding, I was able to get an output using a simple greedy approach. The problem is actually hard if you consider a particular edge case, but both my reviewer and I missed the edge case that made the problem actually hard and they agreed that my simple greedy approach is right and I got through.
2nd round was supposed to happen on the same day but we were sent back because panelists were not available. 2nd round happened virtually after almost a month after multiple attempts to connect with the recruiter to schedule it.
It was supposed to be a HLD round according to the recruiter, but the interviewer said that I need to solve this problem for the 1st 20 minutes, and after which they may discuss other things. It was again a hard problem and they wanted full working code covering all edge cases within 20 minutes. I took almost 50 minutes in writing the working solution by covering all edge cases, but I came to know that I was rejected.
The entire interview experience was awkward and organised badly. They called over a 100 people onsite and made them write code on their local editors where test cases and code were manually reviewed by a set of interviewers and question itself was handed out as printouts.
Interview Questions (1)
Employee Free Time
Given the schedules of all employees (each schedule is a list of non‑overlapping intervals when that employee is busy), find the common free intervals across all employees where no one is working.