SAP Labs India Interview Experience (On Campus)

SAP Labs India visited our college for full time hiring for the position of Associate Developer.

Round 1 (Online Test):

This round consisted of 2 coding questions. The platform was Hackerrank and the time allotted was 1 hour. There were 4-5 sets of questions, and each student got one of those sets of questions. The questions that were in my set are as follows:

Q-1: You are given two arrays, earning and cost. An worker works for few days. Each day has a new pay per unit of work (earning) and a new cost per unit of food (cost). Working 1 unit costs 1 unit of energy, and eating 1 unit of food adds 1 unit of energy. Here are some constraints:

• The worker arrives with no money, but with energy. He can never have more energy than he arrives
  with, and it can never be negative.
• He can do any amount of work every day (possibly not do any work at all), limited only by his energy. He cannot work when his energy is zero.
• He can eat any amount of food every day (possibly not have any food at all), limited by the money he has. He cannot eat when the money he has is zero.
• He can eat food at the end of the day, and cannot return to work after eating. He can return to work on the next day.

Calculate the maximum amount of money the worker can make.

Q-2: Given a graph, where there is an edge between two vertices only if they are friends. Find the minimum of all friend factor of each trio. (trio is a triangle of 3 edges)

Friend Factor : For each trio (3 nodes that are all connected to each other), the friend factor is defined as the sum of number of nodes that each of the three are connected to, other than each other.

58 students were shortlisted for the interviews.

Round 2 (Technical Interview-F2F):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Explain your M.Tech Thesis Project.
3. Rotate an array.
4. Search an element in a rotated and sorted array.
5. Convert a binary tree into its mirror image.
6. A function is given which has 3 arguments – x, a, b. The value stored in ‘x’ (unknown) is equal to either of the value stored in ‘a’ or ‘b’. The function should return the value of ‘x’ swapped with either ‘a’ or ‘b’ i.e. if x=a, then the function should store the value of b in x and return it, else the function should store the value of a in x and return it.

In all the above coding questions, the interviewer was looking for the most optimised solution. He was helpful and was constantly giving hints whenever I got stuck somewhere. Also, he was looking for clean, error-free codes.

Round 3 (Technical Interview-F2F):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Given a sequence of numbers: 1, 4, 60, 11, 16, 46, guess the next number. (Hint: Just spell out the numbers)
3. System Design Question: You have a website which is accessed by 3 users. How will you store the contents and the details of these 3 users efficiently such that no collision happens between their data. I told him 3 methods and he was okay with those.

Round 4 (HR Round-F2F):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Explain your projects one by one. I had mentioned 5 projects in my CV, so I explained each of those briefly.
3. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
4. Rate yourself in C and C++ out of 10.
5. What is one product you would like to develop in SAP?

Round 5 (Managerial Round-F2F):

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Why do you think you will be a good fit in SAP?
3. How dedicated are you in your work?
4. If you are working in a team and there is one member who doesn’t like to work with you, what will you do?
5. Do you have any preferred job location?

In the end, they selected 8 students, and I was one of those lucky 8 people.

Some generic tips:

1. Practice, practice and practice a lot of coding, especially from the topics: Array, Tree, Graph, Dynamic Programming, Hashing etc.
2. Practice writing codes both on your machine and white paper.
3. Discuss your approach with your interviewer before writing the code on the paper.
4. Don’t write fake points in your CV, as your interviewer with catch you in no time.
5. Don’t write fake points in your CV, as your interviewer with catch you in no time.
6. Be thorough with your projects and whatever you write on your CV.
7. Be confident and always put up a smile on your face.