Phonepe | Fresher | India | October 2021 | Rejected
Summary
I had an off-campus problem-solving interview at Phonepe for a fresher role. Despite a positive interaction with the interviewer, I found the questions challenging and was ultimately rejected after not fully solving multiple problems.
Full Experience
I had an off-campus problem-solving interview at Phonepe. The overall experience was quite pleasant, and the interviewer was very supportive. We began with standard introductions before diving into the technical questions. I was presented with three distinct problems. The first involved optimizing a restaurant's dish selection based on quality and price, which I couldn't fully solve; I later realized it was a variation of the Longest Increasing Subsequence problem, requiring a specific sorting approach. The second question was conceptually very similar to the LeetCode problem: Minimum Speed to Arrive on Time. For the third question, a dynamic programming challenge about a rabbit maximizing points with limited jumps, I struggled particularly with efficiently tracking the maximum value within a moving window of size k. The interviewer eventually hinted at using a deque for this. Given that I only managed to solve about one and a half questions to their satisfaction, I anticipated not receiving a call back.
Interview Questions (3)
There is a restaurant and restaurant serves n dishes, each dish has a quality and a price. A dish is considered better if the quality and price of it is higher than other dish. Given n dishes find minimum number of changes in quality remove the above condition for any pair of dish.
The question was conceptually very much related to the LeetCode problem: Minimum Speed to Arrive on Time.
The question was related to finding the maximum number of points a rabbit can make while reaching the end of an array, provided a maximum number of jumps k it can hop. This was a dynamic programming problem, but the main discussion revolved around efficiently tracking the maximum value within a moving window of size k. Specifically, to reach index i, one can jump from i-k to i-1. The challenge was how to maintain the maximum value in this window as it moves during iteration. This problem is closely related to Jump Game II on LeetCode.