Indihood | SDE | L3 | 2 YOE | Reject

I applied for the SDE L3 role at Indihood through a staffing agency.

Round-1 (15-30 min): Indihood Recruiter Connect

• Purpose: This round was to assess my cultural fit, gauge my knowledge about Indihood, and verify if I had reviewed the job description.
• Questions: I was asked, "Why do you want to switch jobs?" and "What do you know about Indihood?"
• Outcome: This initial round went well.

Round-2 (60 min): Online Assessment

• Format: The assessment consisted of three subjective questions, each allocated 20 minutes. Additionally, I was given code snippets for time complexity analysis, debugging, and error fixing.
• Outcome: I successfully solved 100% of the problems.

Round-3 (60 min): Technical Interview-1

• Questions:
  1. Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal
  2. Find Median from Data Stream
• Outcome: I provided optimal solutions and coded them efficiently for both problems. I would rate my performance in this round as a Strong Hire.

Round-4 (60+30 min): Technical Interview-2 (Extended by 30 min)

• Question: I was given a problem where "The likability of a YouTuber is defined as the maximum value of L such that the given YouTuber has posted at least L videos that have each been liked at least L*1000 times. Given the videos and the number of likes for each video, return the likability of a YouTuber."
• Approach: I discussed and drafted the problem with example input and output. We explored 6-7 different approaches, analyzing their time complexities for both sorted and unsorted input arrays. I then coded an optimal solution using binary search.
• Additional Discussion: We also delved into the internal workings of HashMap, collision handling, array size increase, and handling scenarios where one node gets all keys. We concluded with a discussion on my most impactful project.
• Outcome: I felt I performed very well and would rate this as a Strong Hire.

Round-5 (60 min): Technical Interview-3

• Question 1: "Consider different numbers which can be represented in the form of (2^x)(3^y)(5^z) where x, y, z ≥ 0. Get the first n numbers following this pattern."
• Approach: I used a heap for this problem. After discussing the approach and complexity analysis, the interviewer was satisfied and moved to the next problem without asking me to code it.
• Question 2: "There are n people all doing handshakes in a circle. Constraints: All people must handshake. All people are doing handshakes parallelly. No overlapping handshakes."
• Approach: I dry-ran the problem with different 'n' values up to 8 and quickly identified the pattern as Catalan numbers. For instance:
  • For n = odd => 0
  • For n = 2 => 1
  • For n = 4 => 2
  • For n = 6 => 5
  • For n = 8 => 14
  I coded the Catalan number approach, but the interviewer was expecting a solution without using the direct Catalan number formula, which I struggled to code.

Final Verdict:

Unfortunately, I was rejected due to my performance on the last question in the final round. It was quite disheartening to miss out after getting so close, but such is life.