Infosys conducted HackWithInfy, a coding competition for 2022 engineering students graduating across India. Only one Round of coding tests was conducted this year in May 2021. The results came out in June 2021 and I had the opportunity to appear for a Power Programmer interview.
The interview was scheduled for July 22, 2021, at 9:00 AM and was a one-hour-long interview.
The interview joined the meeting at 9:03 AM, then:
Interviewer: Hi , {my_Name}
Me: Hello Sir.
Interviewer: Am I taking your name correctly?
Me: Yes Sir.
Interviewer: So ${myName}, the interview will be divided into two parts, first the coding round, followed by a technical discussion.
Me: *nodding my head
Interviewer: There is a library, that sells books and gives a discount on the price……..
Me: Sorry sir for interrupting. Can I write down the question ?? (I was not ready for it, I thought based on all the interview experience I have read, the interview generally starts with “introduce yourself” or “tell me about your skillset”, etc..)
Interviewer: Sure, share your screen and use any editor
Me: Shared my screen and used VSCode as my editor.
Interviewer: Continued with the question. (The question was similar to Sliding Window Maximum (Maximum of all subarrays of size k) from GFG).
Me: Thinking (once mentioned Heap while thinking) Asked few questions related to the problem, then again Thinking(for 5min). Then gave him the Brute Force Solution with time complexity O(n*k).
Interviewer: Write the code and use any language of your choice.
Me: Wrote the code in Python.
Interviewer: Why did you disregard the heap idea?
Me: Gave him the reason.
Interviewer: Ok. Let us move to the second question. Given a palindrome number find the next smallest palindrome.
Me: Told him my approach.
Interviewer: Gave some test cases.
Me: Dry run my approach on those test cases.
Interviewer: Tell one of your projects and some difficulties that you have faced.
(the discussion went for 7 to 10 minutes)
Interviewer: Have you worked on any databases?
Me: Yes sir. I have worked on NoSql databases (MongoDb).
Interviewer: Why NoSql?? Why not a traditional SQL database?
Me: Told him my requirement and how NoSql was solving my problem.
Interviewer: Give me some disadvantages of NoSql over SQL?
Me: Told him about the disadvantage (I have mention normalization in my answer)
Interviewer: As you have mentioned normalization. What is normalization? Can you explain with example?
Me: Gave him the definition. And Discussed all the steps with examples.
Interviewer: Do you know about OS?
Me: Yes Sir.
Interviewer: Oh you are a CSE student, you have Operating System in your academics. Am I right?
Me: Yes, Sir.
Interviewer: There are two processes (A and B). B is reading a file and process A wants to access the same file. How will OS handle this case?
Me: Told him about Semaphores.
Interviewer: As you have mentioned NodeJs in your resume, tell me some technical differences between NodeJs and Java.
Me: (I have nothing related to Java in my resume nor do code in Java) Mentioned about the NodeJs community, NPM.
Interviewer: (Mentioned about the Java community and told me about Maven) Give me some technical differences.
Me: Mention to him how NodeJs does the async operation Javascript being single-threaded. Describe how the event loop works in detail.
Interviewer: As you know how NodeJs internally works. Can you give me the output of the code?
Javascript
let a = new Promise(resolve => {
console.log(1);
});
a.then(_ => console.log(2));
Me: Again Thinking
Interviewer: Just say what you think then we will discuss.
Me:
1
2
(Again Thinking)
Interviewer: Run the code.
VS Code:
1
Me: Ohh. The promise is not getting resolved.
Interview: Now give me the output for this.
Javascript
let a = new Promise(resolve => {
console.log(1);
setTimeout(() => {
resolve();
}, 3000);
});
console.log("Hello")
a.then(_ => console.log(2));
Me: Thinking
1
Hello
2 (After 3sec)
Interviewer: Run the code
VS Code:
1
Hello
2 (After 3sec)
Interviewer: (Smile) Do you have any questions for me?
Me: Asked for some feedback.
Interviewer: Gave the feedback. And told me it’s good to know the fundamentals and how things work.
(Followed by some other general discussion and some HR questions) then
Interviewer: Nice talking to you.
Me: Thank you for your time, sir.