Navi Technologies Interview Experience for SDE 1 (Off-Campus)

Round 1 Coding Assignment: I applied for SDE 1 position and got a call from HR about my background and expected compensation. Then she shared one geek trust assignment which I need to solve in 2 days.

here are some guidelines for it.

• Coding should be in Java
• Working code is required
• Code is evaluated for proper domain modeling and design, and need not be optimized
• Separation of concerns must be taken care
• The solution should be extensible
• Writing all the necessary Unit tests is expected
• Necessary design patterns must be implemented
• Naming variable conventions
• Input needs to be read from a text file, and output should be printed to the console. Your program should execute and take the location to the test file as a parameter.

The Initial Maven package was given by geektrust team, need to add logic and write unit tests. I completed my assignment and got a call from HR regarding round 2.

Round 2 Face to Face 1 hour: It was a DSA round, after a quick introduction interviewer directly jumped to the questions.

Problem 1: Given two strings you need to find the difference and tell what character you should add or remove to get the target string. after a minute I realized that this is a standard edit distance problem with 2 operations- insert and delete. Implemented it quickly. follow-up question was to print the character, this can be done by traversing the DP matrix once again and checking if the dp[i][j] is coming from dp[i-1][j] or dp[i][j-1] based on it print the character.

Problem 2: Given a list of edges you need to tell if we add will it create a cycle and at the end, we need to tell if this is creating a forest or not. Discussed the DFS approach for cycle detection and told the optimized solution with Disjoint set union. implemented it by path compression and union by the rank method.

Round 3 Hiring Manager 45 minutes: He explained to me what type of work he is doing. he was in the org for 3 years and was a senior manager. did he ask a few questions like why Navi? what do you expect from Navi? After my introduction, he gave me a google doc and the question was to find the maximum area of the histogram. implemented and give a dry run with one stack. I have done this question before so I knew the corner cases and all. after this he asked me if I had any questions I asked what qualities a fresher should have to join the navi? he told me to be curious and blah blah blah.

Round 4 Cultural Fit Round: I thought this round will be just formality and expected questions like what’s your expected ctc and all but the guy was the department head. Ex IIM-A and had 10 years of experience. he asked me about my background and then difficult situations based questions, every time I answer he looks not happy about it. Don’t know what exactly he wanted but he was giving negative vibes. In the end, I told them that I am very excited about this opportunity and he said we will see about it. 🙁

After 3 days HR told me I was not selected and the reason she told me was that I should improve on coding. Don’t know what they expect beyond an optimal solution and it was a complete waste of time.