Cognizant interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 2

Cognizant
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2 rounds | 4 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Journey
At the starting, I was a very bad student in terms of data structure and algorithms but when I realized that this is the only way to get placement then I started preparation in this field. I followed strivers sheet for practice.
Application story
Company organizes a nationwide test for the selection I have applied on the company website for the same..
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I was selected for this role. My answers were satisfactory and had a great discussion with the interviewer.
Preparation
Duration: 4 months
Topics: Data Structures, Pointers, OOPS, System Design, Algorithms, Dynamic Programming
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Must do Previously asked Interview as well as Online Test Questions.
Tip 2 : Go through all the previous interview experiences from Codestudio and Leetcode.
Tip 3 : Do at-least 2 good projects and you must know every bit of them.

Application process
Where: Campus
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Make your resume short and try to make it one page only and mention all the skills that you are confident in.
Tip 2 : Do not put false things on your resume.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Medium
Online Coding Test
Duration60 minutes
Interview date24 Jul 2021
Coding problem2

1. Left Rotations of An Array

Moderate
10m average time
90% success
0/80
Asked in companies
IBMCognizantPaytm (One97 Communications Limited)

You are given an array consisting of 'N' elements and you need to perform 'Q' queries on the given array. Each query consists of an integer which tells the number of elements by which you need to left rotate the given array. For each query return the final array obtained after performing the left rotations.

Note:

Perform each query on the original array only i.e. every output should be according to the original order of elements.

Example:

Let the array be [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and the queries be {2, 4, 1}. For every query, we’ll perform the required number of left rotations on the array.

For the first query, rotate the given array to the left by 2 elements, so the resultant array is: [3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2].

For the second query, rotate the given array to the left by 4 elements, so the resultant array is: [5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4].

For the third query, rotate the given array to the left by 1 element, so the resultant array is: [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1].
Try solving now

2. Palindromic Substrings

Moderate
20m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
MicrosoftSalesforceAmazon

You have been given a string STR. Your task is to find the total number of palindromic substrings of STR.

Example :
If the input string is "abbc", then all the possible palindromic substrings would be: ["a", "b", "b", c", "bb"] and hence, the output will be 5 since we have 5 substrings in total which form a palindrome.
Note :
A string is said to be a 'Palindrome' if it is read the same forwards and backwards. 
For example, “abba” is a palindrome, but “abbc” is not.

A 'Substring' is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string. 
For example, "a", "b", "c", "ab", "bc", "abc" are substrings of "abc".
Try solving now
02
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 minutes
Interview date28 Jul 2021
Coding problem2

1. Maximum of minimum for every window size

Hard
45m average time
50% success
0/120
Asked in companies
MicrosoftCognizantIBM

You are given an array of ‘N’ integers, you need to find the maximum of minimum for every window size. The size of the window should vary from 1 to ‘N’ only.

For example:

ARR = [1,2,3,4]
Minimums of window size 1 = min(1), min(2), min(3), min(4) = 1,2,3,4
Maximum among (1,2,3,4)  is 4

Minimums of window size 2 = min(1,2), min(2,3),   min(3,4) = 1,2,3
Maximum among (1,2,3) is 3

Minimums of window size 3 = min(1,2,3), min(2,3,4) = 1,2
Maximum among (1,2) is 2

Minimums of window size 4 = min(1,2,3,4) = 1
Maximum among them is 1
The output array should be [4,3,2,1].
Try solving now

2. Course Schedule II

Hard
50m average time
50% success
0/120
Asked in companies
AppleUberPhonePe

You have been given ‘N’ courses and some courses may have prerequisites. Now consider a matrix ‘PREREQUISITES’ of size 'M' x 2 which represents that you must complete the course 'PREREQUISITES[i][1]' before the course 'PREREQUISITES[i][0]'.


Your task is to return the order of courses you should take to finish all courses.


Note:
If it is impossible to finish all courses, return an empty array. If there are multiple answers, return any one.


For example:
Input:
3 2
1 2
2 3

There are three courses to take. To start with, First course 3 is taken. Then course 2 is taken for which course 3 must be completed. 

At last course 1 is taken for which course 2 must be completed. So the correct course order is [3,2,1].    
Try solving now

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