Accolite Interview Experience for Internship+FTE | On-Campus 2020

Accolite came for hiring in August 2020 in our campus for the SDE role (FTE + internship). We had a total of 4 rounds (2 online + 2 technicals). Here is my interview experience for the same.

Round 1 (Online MCQ Round): This round was conducted on CodeLyzer platform, There were 25-30 MCQs from OS, CAO, DBMS, aptitude, and algorithm analysis. There was 1 easy aptitude question as well.

Round 2 (Online Coding Round): Only 1 question on Hard Backtracking(popular question known as containing a virus). We had to enter sample tests also and run code.

After this round 25 students were shortlisted for next round.

Round 3 (Interview): More of a kind of warm-up round. I was asked to tell logic of bubble sort and design a Database system on Placement Cell Software for colleges to track which student got placed and other functionalities had to draw ER diagram and SQL queries. Also had a discussion on projects on my resume.

This round went for around 40 minutes.

Round 4 (Final Interview) 90 minute: This was the Hardest of all rounds. They first drilled me on concepts of hashing and collisions and different scenarios when and what type of hashmap is ideal for different scenarios like mapping of IP addresses while DNS resolving and other scenarios like that. 

• Then easier question https://www.w3wiki.net/validity-of-a-given-tic-tac-toe-board-configuration/ took some time for me because he kept asking whether am I missing some edge cases and was checking whether I could write modular code or not. This question went for around 25 minutes. 
• Then asked a hard DP problem https://www.w3wiki.net/minimum-increment-or-decrement-required-to-sort-the-array-top-down-approach/. This question went for around 50 minutes and I really struggled on this problem and remained stuck, I first put forward a greedy solution which I realized later that it will fail, then put forward a complete brute force so that at least I had a code giving correct solution but was exponential, then after some struggle I able to come up with a bottom-up dynamic solution, and they were satisfied with my approach and didn’t ask me to code it as time was up. 

Later a general discussion on my image processing project which was based on data structure algorithms and ended the interview

This round went for around 90 minutes.

Suggestions: 

• Think out loud
• Have some mock interview practice with some friends, it will help you to handle pressure while giving an interview.