First Interview Experience
→ Placements Season was going on the College. Everyone in the college were serious for placements this time. But I never took placements that seriously because I was confident I can clear technical interviews. I applied for this company also just to get the experience of real interview. I had zero research on the company or the role before having interview. Still I decided to attend the interview and went to city Campus.
→ We were instructed to appear to interview hall by 8:30 AM. I along with my 3 friends reached interview hall by 9 AM. Yes, we were late but the placements Orientation started only at 10:30 AM. I thought it will be a mix of technical & aptitude MCQ exam but I was shocked to know that 1st round was actually paper coding DSA round. But I was happy because I can write answers clearly and of course it was difficult for other students to cheat.
The 2 questions asked in the paper coding DSA round were:
- Find the missing number from an array containing numbers from 0 to n.
- Find the pivot index in an array for which leftSum = rightSum.
Then I and all my 3 friends got shortlisted on the first Round.
→ There were altogether 40 students for 2nd round and 6 interviewers were taking interviews in 6 different rooms. I talked with the candidates who gave interview to predict the questions but, it was all random. Every Interviewer were asking questions on their own style. But even then the questions were very basic for me. I was excited and waiting to go inside but, they called me at the last. Literally I was the last candidate to appear in 1st round of interview.
→ I went inside with full confidence. The interviewer was a senior backend developer with more than 8 years of experience. He told me to sit next to him so that he can see my screen. He asked me to open any code editor. I knew I had to make a good impression, so I opened my terminal & created new empty java project and opened VS Code there. He gave me 1 DSA question. String Compression.
input: aaabbcc
output: a3b2c1
This was a very easy question for me. I solved it and showed it to him. He looked at the code & gave me another test case: "aaabbcaaa". I executed it, showed to him & he said "okay, it's correct. Do you have any question for me?". I was like, "is my interview already done? no more questions?".
→ When I got out of interview hall, most of the candidates had already left for their home. Only 4 candidates were selected for 3rd round then after 5 minutes, I was immediately selected and called for the 3rd round interview.
→ This time interviewer was different. He looked at my Resume continuously for 5 minutes. Then asked a simple question to me, "All your projects are on Javascript, how comfortable are you with python?". I simply said, "I know basics but I haven't used python in my production level projects". Then he asked me some simple questions like:
i) What is API? ii) What is JSON? iii) What is status code?
→ I answered them all and he said, okay you can leave.
→ Again 3rd round also hardly lasted for 10 mins.
→ It was already around 7 PM and we were instructed to return hostel.
→ We returned to hostel & next morning, I got the message saying I have been Shortlisted for HR round.
→ I had appeared in many virtual interviews before but my first physical interview was way more easier than what I had expected. I think it was just the outcome of all the hard works that I had put in learning the things in depth.