Birlasoft Ltd. interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

Software Engineer

Birlasoft Ltd.

1 rounds | 1 Coding problems

Anonymous

Experienced | Oct 2024

Selected

Interview preparation journey

Journey

I began my coding journey in 6th grade, starting with Java programming as part of my school curriculum since I was an ICSE board student. Throughout my school and college days, I continued working on DSA and competitive programming in Java. During my time in college, I also worked on machine learning projects as part of research and development.

Application story

I received this opportunity through my campus placement drive. First, we were shortlisted based on our resumes, and then they conducted an online test consisting of MCQ-based questions and one coding problem. The students were shortlisted after this online test. Finally, Birlasoft conducted an online interview, which was entirely coding-based.

Why selected/rejected for the role?

I cleared both interview rounds and was able to answer the questions and solve the coding problem with utmost clarity, which led to my selection for this role.

Preparation

Duration: 6 Months

Topics: Dynamic Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms, Bit Manipulation, Sliding Window, Backtracking, Java, Python

Tip

Tip 1: Be clear about the basics of data structures and learn how to build the logic for a problem. Then, try to find the solution, starting from a brute force approach and progressing to an optimized solution.
Tip 2: As a fresher, it's important to have at least two good projects. You should definitely have clarity about your projects and be able to answer questions about them during the interview.
Tip 3: The number of DSA questions you solve doesn’t matter; what matters your understanding of is how to approach a certain question, which data structures to use, and how to find a better solution.

Application process

Where: Campus

Eligibility: above 7 CGPA (Salary: 5LPA)

Resume tip

Tip 1: Have a good understanding of at least one programming language.
Tip 2: Have at least two projects about which you possess thorough knowledge.

Interview rounds

Round

Easy

Video Call

Duration30 minutes

Interview date19 Oct 2024

Coding problem1

It was conducted during the evening shift. The interview went really smoothly.

1. Maximum Subarray Sum

Moderate

25m average time

75% success

0/80

Asked in companies

Given an array of numbers, find the maximum sum of any contiguous subarray of the array.

For example, given the array [34, -50, 42, 14, -5, 86], the maximum sum would be 137, since we would take elements 42, 14, -5, and 86.

Given the array [-5, -1, -8, -9], the maximum sum would be -1.

Follow up: Do this in O(N) time.

Problem approach

Step 1: Initialize the ans variable to 0.
Step 2: Initialize the currentSum of our initially empty window to 0.
Step 3: Initialize the pointers of our sliding window: begin = 0, end = 0.
Step 4: Instantiate the hash map numToIndex to store the index of the last occurrence of numbers seen so far in nums.
Step 5: Start the sliding window process. While end < nums.length:
Step 6: Get the current number we are adding to our window: currNum = nums[end].
Step 7: Get its last occurrence: lastOccurrence = numToIndex.getOrDefault(currNum, -1).
Step 8: While the window still contains this current number (begin <= lastOccurrence) or our window size is too large (end - begin + 1 > k):

Update the current sum: currentSum -= nums[begin].
Shrink our window by 1: begin++.Step 9: Our window is good now. Add the newly added element to our map: numToIndex.put(currNum, end).

Step 10: Update the current sum: currentSum += nums[end].
Step 11: If our window is of size k, update ans if currentSum is larger: ans = max(ans, currentSum).
Step 12: Increment end to add the next element for the next iteration: end++.
Step 13: Return ans.

Try solving now