1. Round 1 was a HackerRank test. Average Questions
2. Round 2 was Technical Interview on Problem Solving / DS / Algorithms.
In this round, HR send a SDE 1 named Himanshu Gera to take the interview. He first of all asked me recent projects, I described a generic system of Multilingual support and he didn't find it interesting. Then started the coding questions, they were 2 in total.
2.1 Find max sum of a subsequence in array such that adjacent elements don't need to be considered.
When he said to dry run the concept of the solution, I started, then in mid the interviewer suddenly asks "Are you copy pasting the solution from somewhere ?" then I asked "Is this question on Internet ?"
Point if I am able to describe and dry run the solution then also they think that candidate is cheating. And they want to confirm whether interviewee know that the solution which he is giving do the interviewee even know that what paradigm it is called (In this case DP)
To confirm that I am cheating or not, he said to write the solution with recursive approach and not the iterative one.
The interviewer wasn't convinced until I proposed DP solution in this.
2.2 There is a matrix composed of either "." or "#", we have to traverse through "." from top left cell to bottom right cell with minimum steps. the min steps cannot be more than k. We can move left, right, top, bottom in a step.
I started with DFS solution, then since interviewer wasn't convinced so I thought whether solution with DP is possible and till end I wasn't able to find it and interviewer didn't helped in solution instead he was focused on finding flaws or providing test case where DP solution can break. I wonder if even interviewer also had a better solution.
So, in a nutshell, It was 1st interview of SDE 1 role and all the solution the interviewer wants is in DP and that too where interviewer has 1 year experience in Software Development and more in Cloud Support in AWS, he thinks interviewee is cheating and this support guy needs all solutions in DP.
So my suggestion is first check whether the guy you are sending for interview, is he capable of taking interview of an interviewee. Also review your work culture because from interview it seemed like an interviewer who himself is SDE 1 will not give go ahead to the candidate who has better experience than interviewer for SDE 1 role.
