Interview Experience with Sahaj
The placement season is about to start, I have been in this situation about a year ago, placement season can be very important as it is a starting point of one’s career. So let’s get straight to the point.
Campus Presentation
Sahaj is quite popular in our college and as It was the third company visiting our campus so competition was quite tough, Coming back to the presentation It was pretty different compared to other campus presentations we had as I remember there was one slide with Banyan tree something like this
with some words on leaves and it was our task to ask questions about that slide It was way too interactive and interesting.
Aptitude and Coding Round
First-round was the MCQ round having 40 questions with a time limit of 30 minutes questions were from topics like OOPS, Data Structures, Operating Systems, DBMS, Networking.
The next part was the coding round, there was one question on string manipulation. I believed that the question was easy but there was a lot to do within the duration of 30 minutes. I submitted the code around 2 minutes were remaining. Some test cases were not covered by the code snippet still, I submitted it. It is always better to get a partial score than no score at all. This decision of submitting code got me into the next round. In the next round, I got to know that my code covered around 80% of test cases.
Interviews
First-round was a technical interview After I introduced myself we jumped right into the interview. During the interview, I felt that It is more of a discussion rather than an interview Interviewers were quite experienced and friendly.
We started with core subjects we had some discussion around threads and processes, Normalization, Indexing. We had a discussion about relational and non-relational databases and their use case. In Data Structures there was a question around trie we discussed what is trie? Why do we need trie? What is the use case of trie? Is there any alternative for trie? I had worked on blockchain as one of my projects. So I was asked basic what and why questions and some questions around the working of blockchain. This round lasted for around an hour.
The second round was quite tough as compared to the first round. Interviewers introduced themselves. There was one question based on searching techniques and the target was to find the target value within the minimum number of queries. As common interview practice, I started with the most simple approach sequential search. Then I explained my approach with binary search somehow my approach was wrong I realized that during the dry run of test cases, So I had to make slight modifications to the standard binary search approach to get a solution this solution was working was it felt inefficient to me, I tried one more time with the ternary search and this approach was little better compared to the last one.
The next question was why Sahaj? I tried my best to answer this question with a number of points but for each point I had, they had a valid counterpoint.
At one point I felt as if they are convincing me, Dude, why are you even joining this organization It was so stressful at that time Now thinking about that conversation after 5 months working as an intern Actually it was quite realistic and funny too :D. Apart from this incident, this round was quite fun we even discussed shows like TBBT, Dark. This round lasted about 2 hours.
Additional Round
I got a call from the org building team that there will be a short additional round. In this round, I was given some scenarios and How will I face these scenarios. In this round, I think what is the thought process to handle tough situations was at the test. This round lasted for around 45 minutes.
Final Call
Around 9 PM I had to join the final call. At the time of the interview ban on Chinese products was trending. So we had a quick discussion around that. After this discussion, they had the offer letter.
It was one of the best moments. finally, hard work paid off.
Writing this after working with Sahaj for 5 months, There has been some ups and downs(mostly ups :D). There has been a lot of learning during this time. Overall It’s quite fun to work here.
If you are reading this then Best Luck with your upcoming Interview.