Tata 1Mg SDE Intern Interview

I was in my 7th semester and asked an employee for any openings. After a few days, she sent me a link for a backend intern position. I applied for it, and after 20 days, I got a call from HR that my resume had been shortlisted. Being from a tier-3 college with no placement opportunities, I was so happy to get my first off-campus interview at such a big company.

My interview was scheduled for October 4th (2 days after the HR call). I brushed up on my knowledge of DBMS, OOPS, CN, and DSA.

The interview was scheduled for 3 pm, and there were two interviewers. They started with my introduction, asked about my past experiences, and posed questions on core subjects and my resume. Then they jumped to DSA:

• Q1: Find the local minima in an array I started with the brute force approach, then explained the optimal approach (O(nlogn)) and was able to solve it completely. They gave me different test cases, and I explained them very well. Then they asked a follow-up question:
• Q2: Find the local minima in a 2D matrix I explained my brute force approach but couldn’t optimize it. At the end, the interviewer told me it wasn’t an easy question, and he was happy with my performance.

After 20 minutes, I got a call from HR saying I had cleared the first round, and my next round was scheduled for the next day.

At this point, I started preparing very hard. I tried to solve more than 100 DSA questions and puzzles, which was my mistake. I slept only 4 hours and was busy preparing topics. Because of this, my mind wasn’t functioning fully.

In the second round, after some basic questions, the interviewer again jumped to DSA. He gave me a simple problem. It may not be simple for everyone, but since I had practiced it more than five times, it should have been manageable:

• Q1: Count the number of subarrays having sum K I solved it with the brute force approach. Then he asked me to solve it optimally. Since I had already solved this question before, I jumped straight to coding without dry-running my approach on paper. As a result, I used the wrong variables while calculating the answer.

Because it was on a text editor, I had to correct it and dry-run the approach. During the dry run, I found out my solution wasn’t working. I panicked, thinking, Why am I not able to solve this basic question? What will happen now? I won’t be selected. These thoughts further reduced my focus, and I couldn’t find my mistake.

In this way, I ruined my interview. The interviewer gave me the next question, which I was able to solve. However, when I confirmed with HR after the interview, she told me I wasn’t selected.

Do’s and Don’ts:

• Do: Take proper sleep before an interview.
• Do: Always dry-run your approach before presenting it to the interviewer.
• Don’t: Overstudy before any interview.
• Don’t: Be overconfident about any question.