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

SDE - 1

Mercer Mettl
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3 rounds | 6 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Journey
My personal journey is very challenging coming from a middle-class family I need not have the access to a computer for a long time. I came to know about computer when i joined my college but from there i never look back again.
Application story
This is an on-campus placement opportunity for me the company visited my campus for the placement .
Why selected/rejected for the role?
This was a great experience for me i was able to perform well, and i am satisfied with the effort i have put forward.
Preparation
Duration: 3 Months
Topics: Data Structures, Pointers, OOPS, System Design, Algorithms, Dynamic Programming
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Prepare your resume well. 
Tip 2 : Deploy your projects so that the interviewer can view it. Also provide a hyperlink on your resume.
Tip 3 : Be thorough with Data Structures and Algorithms. Also prepare well topics such as OS,DBMS.

Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: Above 6 CGPA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Deploy your projects so that the interviewer can view it. Also, provide a hyperlink on your resume
Tip 2 : It's not important to have fancy projects. Only mention those on which you're confident.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date29 Oct 2022
Coding problem2

1. Word Search - l

Moderate
30m average time
60% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OlaGoldman SachsIBM

You are given a 2D board('N' rows and 'M' columns) of characters and a string 'word'.


Your task is to return true if the given word exists in the grid, else return false. The word can be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cells, where adjacent cells are horizontally or vertically neighboring.


Note:
The same letter cell should not be used more than once.
For Example:
For a given word “design” and the given 2D board 
[[q’, ‘v’, ‘m’, ‘h’],
 [‘d’, ‘e’, ‘s’, ‘i’],
 [‘d’, ‘g’, ‘f’, ‘g’],
 [‘e’, ‘c’, ‘p’, ‘n’]]

The word design can be formed by sequentially adjacent cells as shown by the highlighted color in the 2nd row and last column.

board

Problem approach

You are given a two-dimensional grid having 'N' rows and 'M' columns, consisting of upper case characters. You are also given a word 'WORD'. You have to find the number of occurrences of that word in the grid.
Starting from a given cell, a word can be formed by moving in all eight directions: horizontally left, horizontally right, vertically up, vertically down, and four diagonal directions.

Try solving now

2. Climbing the leaderboard

Moderate
15m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
Goldman SachsDunzoLenskart

Given a leaderboard of a game with the following ranking pattern:

The player with the highest score is ranked number 1 on the leaderboard.

Players who have equal scores receive the same ranking number, and the next player(s) receive the immediately following ranking number.

You are given game scores of a player of ‘M’ rounds. Your task is to return the position obtained in each round.

Note:
The leaderboard scores are in descending order.
The game scores are given in ascending order.
Problem approach

Given a leaderboard of a game with the following ranking pattern:
The player with the highest score is ranked number 1 on the leaderboard.
Players who have equal scores receive the same ranking number, and the next player(s) receive the immediately following ranking number.
You are given game scores of a player of ‘M’ rounds. Your task is to return the position obtained in each round.

Try solving now
02
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date29 Oct 2022
Coding problem2

1. Partition to K equal sum subsets

Moderate
40m average time
70% success
0/80
Asked in companies
Goldman SachsMicrosoftDunzo

You are given an array of 'N' integers, and a positive integer 'K'. You need to determine if it is possible to divide the array into 'K' non-empty subsets such that the sum of elements of each subset is equal.

Note:

1. The array can have duplicate elements.

2. Each of the array elements must belong to exactly one of the 'K' subsets.

3. The elements chosen for a subset may not be contiguous in the array.
Problem approach

You are given an array of 'N' integers, and a positive integer 'K'. You need to determine if it is possible to divide the array into 'K' non-empty subsets such that the sum of elements of each subset is equal.

Try solving now

2. Find prime numbers

Easy
15m average time
80% success
0/40
Asked in companies
HSBCSalesforceDeutsche Bank

You are given a positive integer ‘N’. Your task is to print all prime numbers less than or equal to N.

Note: A prime number is a natural number that is divisible only by 1 and itself. Example - 2, 3, 17, etc.

You can assume that the value of N will always be greater than 1. So, the answer will always exist.

Problem approach

You are given a positive integer ‘N’. Your task is to print all prime numbers less than or equal to N.
Note: A prime number is a natural number that is divisible only by 1 and itself. Example - 2, 3, 17, etc.
You can assume that the value of N will always be greater than 1. So, the answer will always exist.

Try solving now
03
Round
Hard
Video Call
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date29 Oct 2022
Coding problem2

1. The Celebrity Problem

Moderate
30m average time
60% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OlaVisaApple

There are ‘N’ people at a party. Each person has been assigned a unique id between 0 to 'N' - 1(both inclusive). A celebrity is a person who is known to everyone but does not know anyone at the party.

Given a helper function ‘knows(A, B)’, It will returns "true" if the person having id ‘A’ know the person having id ‘B’ in the party, "false" otherwise. Your task is to find out the celebrity at the party. Print the id of the celebrity, if there is no celebrity at the party then print -1.

Note:
1. The helper function ‘knows’ is already implemented for you.
2. ‘knows(A, B)’ returns "false", if A doesn't know B.
3. You should not implement helper function ‘knows’, or speculate about its implementation.
4. You should minimize the number of calls to function ‘knows(A, B)’.
5. There are at least 2 people at the party.
6. At most one celebrity will exist.
Problem approach

There are N people in a party, they might or might not know each other names.
There is a celebrity in the group, celebrity does not know anyone and all people know the celebrity.We can only ask questions like “does A know B?”. (Celebrity problem)
What is the worst case time complexity of the optimal solution to find the celebrity?
O(n)
Let’s say we ask “does A know B?”. If A knows B, A can not be a celebrity.If A does not know B then B can not be a celebrity. So after each question, we can reject one person. Thus we need to ask a maximum of n questions to correctly figure out the celebrity.

Try solving now

2. Pair Sum

Easy
15m average time
90% success
0/40
Asked in companies
SalesforceUberPayU

You are given an integer array 'ARR' of size 'N' and an integer 'S'. Your task is to return the list of all pairs of elements such that each sum of elements of each pair equals 'S'.

Note:

Each pair should be sorted i.e the first value should be less than or equals to the second value. 

Return the list of pairs sorted in non-decreasing order of their first value. In case if two pairs have the same first value, the pair with a smaller second value should come first.
Problem approach

You have been given an integer array/list(arr) and a number 'Sum'. Find and return the total number of pairs in the array/list which when added, results equal to the 'Sum'.

Try solving now

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

What is recursion?

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