Software Engineer Arcesium interview experience | sai kiran reddy

Interview rounds

Round

Medium

Online Coding Interview

Duration90 Minutes

Interview date16 Jul 2021

Coding problem2

HR sent me the link of Hacker Rank test. I was given choice to take test in less than a week.

1. Frog Jump

Easy

30m average time

60% success

0/40

Asked in companies

There is a frog on the '1st' step of an 'N' stairs long staircase. The frog wants to reach the 'Nth' stair. 'HEIGHT[i]' is the height of the '(i+1)th' stair.If Frog jumps from 'ith' to 'jth' stair, the energy lost in the jump is given by absolute value of ( HEIGHT[i-1] - HEIGHT[j-1] ). If the Frog is on 'ith' staircase, he can jump either to '(i+1)th' stair or to '(i+2)th' stair. Your task is to find the minimum total energy used by the frog to reach from '1st' stair to 'Nth' stair.

For Example

If the given ‘HEIGHT’ array is [10,20,30,10], the answer 20 as the frog can jump from 1st stair to 2nd stair (|20-10| = 10 energy lost) and then a jump from 2nd stair to last stair (|10-20| = 10 energy lost). So, the total energy lost is 20.

Problem approach

Algorithm:

Defining 'REC'(i,’ HEIGHTS’ , ‘DP’) function :
If i equal to the length of ‘HEIGHTS’ - 1:
Return 0.
If DP[i] is not equal to -1:
The precomputed value was found.
Return DP[i].
Set ‘ONE_JUMP’ as INF.
Set ‘TWO_JUMP’ as INF.
If i+1 < length of ‘HEIGHTS’:
Set ‘ONE_JUMP’ as abs(HEIGHTS[i]-HEIGHTS[i+1]) + REC(i+1,HEIGHTS,DP).
If i+2 < length of ‘HEIGHTS’:
Set ‘TWO_JUMP’ as abs(HEIGHTS[i]-HEIGHTS[i+2]) + REC(i+2,HEIGHTS,DP).
Set ‘ANS’ as minimum of ONE_JUMP and TWO_JUMP.
Set DP[i] as ‘ANS’.
Return ‘ANS’.
Declare an array DP of size (N+1) to memoize this DP solution.
Set all values of DP to -1.
Set ‘ANS’ as REC(1,HEIGHTS,DP).
Return ‘ANS’.

Try solving now

2. Frequency In A Sorted Array

Easy

15m average time

85% success

0/40

Asked in companies

You are given a sorted array 'ARR' and a number 'X'. Your task is to count the number of occurrences of 'X' in 'ARR'.

Note :

1. If 'X' is not found in the array, return 0.
2. The given array is sorted in non-decreasing order.

Problem approach

Step 1 : Sort the Array.
Step 2: Find the required numbers.
Step 3 : run the logic on the values and return the answer.

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Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration60 Minutes

Interview date11 Aug 2021

Coding problem2

Technical interview with a Senior engineer in the firm

1. Check If Path Exists

Easy

10m average time

90% success

0/40

Asked in companies

You are given a directed and unweighted graph of 'V' vertices and 'E' edges. All edges are given in a 2-dimensional array ‘Edges’ in which ‘Edges[i][0]’ and ‘Edges[i][1]’ contain an edge. Your task is to check if there exists a path from the vertex 'source' to 'destination'.

For Example:

Consider the number of vertices is 4 and number of edges is 3, and the array of edges is:
[ [0, 1]
  [1, 2] 
  [2, 3] ]
there exists one path between 0 and 2, which is 0 -> 1 -> 2. Hence, the answer is 'true'.

Problem approach

Approach: The solution is to perform BFS or DFS to find whether there is a path or not. The graph needs not to be created to perform the bfs, but the matrix itself will be used as a graph. Start the traversal from the top right corner and if there is a way to reach the bottom right corner then there is a path.
Algorithm:
Create a queue that stores pairs (i,j) and insert the (0,0) in the queue.
Run a loop till the queue is empty.
In each iteration dequeue the queue (a,b), if the front element is the destination (row-1,col-1) then return 1, i,e there is a path and change the value of mat[a][b] to -1, i.e. visited.
Else insert the adjacent indices where the value of matrix[i][j] is not -1.

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2. OOPS Questions

Many Java OOPS-related Questions.
Then asked me about the projects.
Then they asked me to make the complete architecture of my recent project. And, they asked a lot of questions about this.

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Be confident
Tip 2 : Be clear on every thing you mentioned on your resume.

Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration75 minutes

Interview date31 Aug 2021

Coding problem4

Firstly, he asked me to introduce myself.
Then, he asked questions on my projects in my current company(Ended up discussing them for a good time)

Followed by OS , DBMS , Coding questions

1. Group Anagrams Together

Moderate

0/80

Asked in companies

You have been given an array/list of strings 'STR_LIST'. You are supposed to return the strings as groups of anagrams such that strings belonging to a particular group are anagrams of one another.

Note :

An Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase. We can generalize this in string processing by saying that an anagram of a string is another string with the same quantity of each character in it, in any order.

Example:

{ “abc”, “ged”, “dge”, “bac” } 
In the above example the array should be divided into 2 groups. The first group consists of { “abc”, “bac” } and the second group consists of { “ged”, “dge” }.

Problem approach

The idea is to sort each word on the list and construct a map where the map’s key is each sorted word, and the map’s value is a list of indices in the array where it is present. After creating the map, traverse the map and get indices for each sorted key. The anagrams are present in the actual list at those indices.

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2. Vertical Order Traversal

Moderate

35m average time

65% success

0/80

Asked in companies

Given a binary tree, return the vertical order traversal of the values of the nodes of the given tree.

For each node at position (X, Y), (X-1, Y-1) will be its left child position while (X+1, Y-1) will be the right child position.

Running a vertical line from X = -infinity to X = +infinity, now whenever this vertical line touches some nodes, we need to add those values of the nodes in order starting from top to bottom with the decreasing ‘Y’ coordinates.

Note:

If two nodes have the same position, then the value of the node that is added first will be the value that is on the left side.

For example:

For the binary tree in the image below.

The vertical order traversal will be {2, 7, 5, 2, 6, 5, 11, 4, 9}.

Problem approach

// min --> Minimum horizontal distance from root
// max --> Maximum horizontal distance from root
// hd --> Horizontal distance of current node from root
findMinMax(tree, min, max, hd)
if tree is NULL then return;

if hd is less than min then
*min = hd;
else if hd is greater than max then
*max = hd;

findMinMax(tree->left, min, max, hd-1);
findMinMax(tree->right, min, max, hd+1);

printVerticalLine(tree, line_no, hd)
if tree is NULL then return;

if hd is equal to line_no, then
print(tree->data);
printVerticalLine(tree->left, line_no, hd-1);
printVerticalLine(tree->right, line_no, hd+1);

Try solving now

3. Operating System Questions

Question-related to Threads, process, Deadlock, how to avoid deadlock, Daemon Threads, Thrashing, Multithreading, Scheduling Algorithms, and many more

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Overall, I was confident and I gave my best for every question I encountered for. (No regrets)

4. DBMS Question

Design a database for a school management system, explain Table schema and Support basic operations on the System.
Entities: Teachers, Students, Subjects
Constraints :1 student can opt for more than one subject and 1 teacher can teach more than 1 subject (possible)

Open Ended Question

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Clearly explain each table , all the columns .
Tip 2 : Explain Foreign key mappings
Tip 3 : Be confident

Round

Easy

HR Round

Duration60 Minutes

Interview date27 Aug 2021

Coding problem0

HR Discussion