OLA Interview Experience | Set 15 (1 Year Experienced for SDE1)

I recently applied for OLA SDE 1 from Linkedin. HR got in contact with me via email and scheduled an interview date for F2F

Round 1:

The first round was a written one. There were two questions given.
Question 1: There are two kinds of bots A and B in a 1-D array. ‘A’ bot can only move left while ‘B’ can only move right. There are also empty spaces in between represented by ‘#’. But it’s also given that the bots cannot cross over each other. Given the initial state and another state, we should tell if the transformation is possible.

Sample Input-

2

#B#A# ##BA#

#B#A# #A#B#

Sample output-

Yes

No

Question 2: This was a simple one. Find the longest subarray in an array where the first element of the subarray is greater than the last element. The entire array shouldnt be taken as a subarray.

Sample Input-

1

5 4 3 2 1

Sample output –

5 4 3 2

Round 2:

The interviewer asked me to explain the answers to the above questions and I had solved both of them correctly. He checked the code and seemed satisfied. Then, he asked me two more questions
Question 1: Given a string, how many minimum rotations are needed to get back the same string. Atleast one rotation needs to be done

Sample Input-

2

abc

abab

Sample Output-

3

2

Question 2: Find the distance between two nodes in a binary tree.

Round 3:

This was taken by a senior guy. He asked me to explain the work that I’ve been doing in my current company. This went on for some 20 mins.

Then he asked me two general vague questions.

Question 1- How do you detect if a HTTP request is coming from a human or a bot. This was a open ended question. He was just trying to understand how we’d approach this problem. He wanted five checks atleast for classifying the request as a bot-sent one. Later he asked me to design the same in terms of components needed on a white board. He kept saying if it is a valid check or not as and when I was answering.

Question 2 – Imagine you’re the only guy in a team who is available while the rest of them are on a outing. If there’s an outage, and the entire service cannot run without this microservice, how would you tackle it? This was again a open ended question.

Then the HR came and enquired about my current CTC, offers in hand, notice period, why OLA and other basic HR questions.