Type- On-Campus
Country- India
College- Tier 1
Stipend- 1.25L per month
First Step
This was an online round consisting of 2 coding questions and MCQs based on core, logical reasoning etc. I solved most of the MCQs (probably all except 1-2) and 1 out of the 2 coding questions. Got to know in the evening that I have my interviews the next day.
Second Step
Interview Round-1
I was a bit nervous since this was my first ever face-to-face interview. Me and interviewer both greeted each other and first he asked me about myself (pretty much the standard question asked in every interview). We then proceeded to my resume. He asked me about my projects and other stuff like why did I make that project and what further imporvements could be done, etc. This went on for 20 mins. Then, he gave me a question.
He asked me to design the search space of a website, let's say maky my trip using data structures such that if we have type "ind", we get the names of all the places starting with the letters "ind" with the names previously searched appearing above the rest and also, arraged in an alphabetical order.
I started with the brute force solution and after a lot of brainstorming I finally gave a solution using tries. The interviewer was actually quite frank and we had a good discussion on this question and other things like working of the company, etc. The interviewer seemed impressed with my tries solution and he concluded the interview. This round lasted for 45 mins
After sitting for around 15 mins, I got the call for my second round
Interview Round-2
The same process of greeting each other and asking questions about myself and my resume were aske in the first 20 mins of the interview. Then he asked me a standard ques of DP (longest palindromic substring). I gave him all the solutions from recursion to tabulation. But he was not satisfied and asked me to come up with another approach to which I gave him the 3-pointers approach. He seemed satisfied with my solution and after asking some basic OOPs questions, he concluded the interview. This round lasted for 40 mins approx.
Still, I got rejected :(
Some people had 3 rounds of interview but I was told that I won't be having the 3rd round since the interviewers seemed satisfied. After sitting for around 3 hours, the final shortlist came out and to my shock, my name wasn't there. I was shocked so I approached my placement coordinator. They told me that there were some errors made by the HR of the company in preparing the final shortlist and and that's why some people didn't have 3rd rounds of interviews. A fellow interviewee told me that he could not tell the 3-pointer approach (we had the same interviewer) and yet, he was selected and I was not.
Messing things up is very easy for these HRs but these interviews matter a lot to candidates like me (I was seriously told that the interviewrs were satisfied with my performace and yet I was rejected). That HR probably would have had a good dinner that night whereas I couldn't sleep or eat for a day. The interviews happened around 1.5 months back and I bagged an internship around a week later, so I am not very stressed about this now but if they have done this to me, they would have done this to several other candidates as well. I'd just like to tell them that although we are mere "applicants" for you, things like these matter a lot to us, so please pay more attention while doing your job.