My 2nd Interview Experience

Today I gave my 2nd off-campus interview. I have given many interviews in small scale startups and worked for some time over there. But now I thought of joining some large scale companies. The overall journey of off-campus placements is really very difficult to be honest. You need to keep an eye on the openings of many companies , connect people of that company ask for referrals because chances of getting your resume shortlisted is very low. The ratio of getting referrals is 2:50. Similarly I managed to contact the Talent Acquisition of CloudSEK.

Initially I applied for the SDE Intern Backend role but he told me that this role is already filled and then I asked him that is the SDE Intern Frontend role still available and he said yes. He considered my application for that and sent me an online assessment.

The online assessment was on the HackerEarth platform which consisted of 2 DSA questions (easy and medium) and 1 mini project. In my case it was to design a undo redo functionality (an input field , two buttons undo and redo).

I completed the assessment and was able to solve all the 3 questions. I mailed the same person about completion of the assessment. After 1 week I got a call informing me that I am shortlisted and deciding the date and time for the interview.

In my Interview , the questions were :

1. Design a snake & ladder board (only the way the numbers are represented)

2. Design an OTP component for 6 digits, each input field consist of one digit and filling the input field automatically focuses on the next input field. Also we need to handle the paste logic

3. Some basic questions like : what is key in map? , what is difference between foreach and map? , why useState was developed even if let, var and const were there? , some questions regarding hooks(specifically useRef).

I was not able to solve the snake & ladder board question and also was not able to solve the paste logic for the OTP component. Later when I saw its implementation I was like I should have thought a little more about this

Verdict : mostly not selected (no mail as of now)

I think the learning process of every student is impacted in both positive and negative way due to AI. Students now are able to make some cool and impressive projects because of it but students have lost the habit of writing code from scratch for learning purpose. This results in having syntax issues , low confidence while writing code in such machine coding interviews.

One thing I learnt is I need to practice more of writing code to build my confidence in such interviews, also while developing my personal projects for learning I should stay a bit far from AI’s because I am not thinking of solving the problem. Hopefully I’ll be able to perform well in my next interviews.

Thank you