🎯 'Vassar Labs SDE Internship Interview Experience'

VASSAR LABS, HYDERABAD

03 January 2019

Eligibility Criteria

1. 60% in the current degree pursuing or 6.0 CPI and above.
2. Should be available for 6 months internship starting from Jun/Jul’19.
3. BE/B.Tech/M.Tech in computer science and Information science.

Stipend - Rs. 25,000/month

PPO(Pre Placement Offer) – Rs. 8.5 LPA

Vassar labs visited for internship recruitment at IIITDM Jabalpur on 3rd of Jan 2019.

There were 3 rounds :

1. Basic Aptitude & Programming Test
2. Face to Face Interview
3. Call Interview

Round 1. Basic Aptitude & Programming Test (Time: 1hr)

Time: 3:30PM - 4:30PM (3rd January 2019)

This test was written test which consists of two sections namely aptitude and programming ability. There were 10 very easy-easy aptitude questions on:

• Time & Work
• Probability
• Equations
• Speed and distance
• Profit-Loss, Simple Interest, Compound Interest
• Ratio & Proportion
• Height & Distance

Questions were very simple. One can easily solve within 45-60 seconds. There are lots of resources available on the internet to practice such questions (for eg. Indiabix).

Programming test consists of total 3 programming question out of which 1 question is of very easy level, 1 question is of easy-moderate level and rest 1 question is of moderate-hard level.

Q1. Write a program of GCD(int a, int b): in language of your choice

Q2. A child is running up a staircase with n steps and can hop either 1 step, 2 steps, or 3 steps at a time. Implement a method to count how many possible ways the child can run up the stairs.

Q3. Write an efficient program to find the sum of contiguous subarray within a one-dimensional array of numbers which has the largest sum.

I was able to solve 9/10 aptitude questions and 2 programming questions correctly in time, hence selected for the next round.

After 1 hour the results were out.

Around 110 students were appeared for this round and out of which 40 students were selected for the Face to Face Interview Round

Round 2. Face to Face Interview

There were 2 officials in the panel who were taking the interviews. Interview started: 6:30PM (3rd January 2019) Interview Ended: 1:30AM (4th January 2019)

That day was the most exhausting day for me. I kept waiting for my interview from 6:30 PM to 12:45 AM. They kept the mobile phones of every student. I waited 6 and half hours for my interview. Those 6 and half hours felt like a whole day. I didn’t ate the lunch. No snacks in the evening. I and my friends dying from hunger. Waiting for your chance without phones, talking to anyone was like sprinkling chillies onto the wounds. Finally we were told to get the dinner from the mess as our turn is late. Had the dinner and went back to the Visitor’s Hostel. The best part is we went to the mess in College’s Innova. This was the first time I felt important in this college.

Waiting for chance started again. We were asking the questions being asked in the interviews from each and every one who had done with the interviews.

Questions of DS and Algorithms being asked during the Interviews were:

• Minimum flips required to maximize a number with k set bits
• Reversing the linked list
• Detect whether the linked list is circular or not
• Kth node from the end in the linked list
• Merging two sorted arrays
• Minimum element in stack
• Design a stack that supports getMin() in O(1) time and O(1) extra space
• Middle element of the linked list
• How do you check if a string contains only digits?
• How do you check if a given string is a palindrome?
• How do you swap two numbers without using the third variable?

Questions of Java being asked during the interviews were:

• ArrayList vs Vector
• ArrayList vs LinkedList
• Internal Implementation of LinkedList, ArrayList, Vector, HashMap
• HashMap vs HashSet
• Abstract class vs Interface
• Polymorphism
• Interface vs Class
• Inheritance
• Local variable and Instance variable?
• Method overloading vs Method Overriding
• Difference Between Heap Memory and Stack Memory
• Difference between List and Set Interface
• Garbage Collection
• JVM, JRE, JDK
• What is singleton class and how to implement it?

As you can see most of the questions were from the Java Collections and OOPs.

Vassar Labs works only with Java, so they were looking for the candidates who were familiar with Java basics, OOPs and collections.