Interview Experience by Kartik Mudgal

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SDE - 1

Urban Company (UrbanClap)

4 rounds | 13 Coding problems

Kartik Mudgal

Fresher | Oct 2020

Selected

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4 upvotes

Interview preparation journey

Journey

Truly Speaking, I was not fond of this world of computer science but anyhow I got admitted to B.Tech in Computer Science. Firstly I planned that I will start learning DSA in the first year but I could not. So, I started DSA in the fourth semester and along with DSA, I also learned development because that is what I wanted to be (A web Developer). By the end of the Third year, I was confident in both DSA and development but even then I keep on revising the concepts. I had contact with my friend who was working in Urban Clap I asked him for a referral and that is all a wrap to my journey.

Application story

At the start of my fourth year of graduation, some of my friends were already placed in various companies. It started to worry me that I was the one who had not even tried for an interview till then. Then, One day I saw an opening in the UrbanClap. So, I contacted my old childhood friend, who was already placed in UrbanClap, to get a referral, and I got one. After that, the interview process was scheduled.

Why selected/rejected for the role?

I think my skills and knowledge were up to the mark and they found me a valuable candidate. Moreover, my communication skills added up to my numbers.

Preparation

Duration: 3 months

Topics: Data Structures, OOPS, Dynamic programming, Algorithms, DBMS, OS

Tip

Tip 1 : Learn the concepts, not the solutions.
Tip 2 : You should have deep knowledge about the projects mentioned in your resume.

Application process

Where: Referral

Eligibility: None

Resume tip

Tip 1 : Resume should be only 1 page.
Tip 2 : Try to tell a story through your resume. For eg - always mention the impact or scale of your projects/internship.

Interview rounds

Round

Medium

Online Coding Test

Duration75 minutes

Interview date11 Oct 2020

Problems3

Meetings II

Problem approach

Step 1 : Created 2 arrays for start time and end time and sorted them.
Step 2 : Applied merge 2 sorted arrays to get a sorted array technique to find the minimum rooms required.
Step 3 : If the start time is less than the end time, I incremented the number of rooms required else I decremented the
number of rooms required.I also kept track of maximum rooms required at any instance of ti...

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Find a value whose XOR with a given value is maximum.

You are given an integer 'X' and your task is to find an integer 'Y' such that the bitwise XOR of the integers 'X' and 'Y' give the maximum pos...

Problem approach

Step 1 : Sort the array.
Step 2 : Xor all elements of the array.
Step 3 : Remove maximum element from xor by doing xor_array ^= current_max_element.
Step 4 : return the resultant array.

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Minimize the maximum difference between adjacent elements in an array

You are given a non-decreasing array and an integer K. You need to remove exactly K integers from the given array such that the maximum difference between adjacent elements is minimum.

Problem approach

The first observation I had was what would I do if the first and last elements were not fixed. I was not able to solve this question completely, hence I used brute force approach(provided in above link) to pass some of the test cases.

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Round

Easy

Video Call

Duration60 minutes

Interview date14 Oct 2020

Problems3

Frequency in a sorted array

You are given a sorted array 'ARR' and a number 'X'. Your task is to count the number of occurrences of 'X' in 'ARR'.

Note :

Problem approach

Step 1 : Provided the linear search solution then I was asked what if the array is sorted?
Step 2 : Since the array is sorted used lower bound and upper bound to find the frequency of the given element

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Rotting Oranges

You have been given a grid containing some oranges. Each cell of this grid has one of the three integers values:

Value 0 - representing an empty cell.

Value 1 - r...

Problem approach

I told the interviewer I had already seen this question. Hence I quickly informed here about the concept of multi-source BFS to find the minimum time such that all oranges become rotten.

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Clone Linked List with Random Pointer

Given a linked list having two pointers i...

Problem approach

Step 1 : Assumed that there is no random pointer present, hence I was able to easily come with the solution to clone a normal linked list.
Step 2 : I was then asked can I do it in constant space, I was able to come up with the logic but wasn't able to code it.

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Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration60 minutes

Interview date17 Oct 2020

Problems3

DBMS

Two Questions: -

1. How would you optimize a database?
2. Difference between Relational vs NoSQL.

Problem approach

Tip 1: Ask follow up questions because sometimes the interviewers give very little information to see how the candidate would approach the problem
Tip 2: GeeksforGeeks is a really good reference for DBMS.
Tip 3: In the above question interviewer expected indexing, normalisation as the main answer.

DBMS

You have an e-commerce website. You have to find the closest warehouse to the customer's address. How would you index your database based on latitude and longitude to find the closest warehouse?

Problem approach

Tip 1: The interviewer doesn't expect bookish answer, they are more interested in your thinking process
Tip 2: The answer for this question is geo-spatial indexing(the name is not important, how you reached the solution is important.

DBMS/OS

You have a large database(100s of TB).Now you have to apply some formatting to it and copy it to another database.
How would you do it?

Problem approach

Tip 1: Always ask follow up questions for such abstract questions
Tip 2: Before jumping to the solution try to identify the problem you might have.
In this question first thing that comes to mind is just copy data from one DB to another.
But the problem is we cannot have such a huge physical memory.

My solution was reading the database in chunks, then formatting it and finally c...

Round

Easy

HR Round

Duration60 minutes

Interview date17 Oct 2020

Problems4

What did you learn in your internships?

Problem approach

Tip 1: Always follow STAR method while answering such questions.
Tip 2: Be as authentic as possible.

What role did you play in your projects?

Problem approach

Tip 1: Try to show your leadership and management skills while answering such questions.

Why do you want to join our company?

Problem approach

Tip 1: Do a thorough research about the company, read about recent press conferences, core values etc.
Tip 2: Do not give generic answers and never mention money.
Tip 3: Try to show how your personal goals align with the company's goals.

System Design

Design a card game. OOD was required in this question.

Problem approach

Tip 1: Try to create a structure(entities required etc.) before answering the question and think loudly
Tip 2: Read about SOLID principles
Tip 3: Try to think of scalability questions on your own while approaching the problem.