The interview started with a HackerRank round, which contained LeetCode medium-level questions to be solved in 120 minutes.

1. The second round was a CoderPad round. It was a face-to-face live coding round. The questions were:

a. You have an array containing scores of students, for example, [[Bobby, 20], [Arun, 30], [Bobby, 60]]. You have to find the maximum average marks out of all the students' average marks. If the average is a decimal, then return the floor integer value. In the above example, the output should be 40 (i.e., (20+60)/2).

b. Find the maximum contiguous repeating letter in a string and return its starting index and count of that repeating sequence. For example, given string = "aabbbbcccbb", the output is [2, 4], since the most repeating letter is 'b' in 'bbbb'.

1. Then, three interviews were scheduled on the same day: a. Data Structures b. Software Engineering Practices c. Software Design and Architecture.

I was able to solve both questions in the Data Structures round, but I was still not selected, and I don't know why. I eventually didn't attend the next two rounds.

Note: I have given random examples in the problem statements as I don't remember them properly.

Overall, I had a negative experience with the Data Structures round interviewers. It seems they don't want to value the experience and skills that a candidate possesses. They were always expecting an approach they were aware of, but by definition, problem-solving doesn't always have only one approach; it can have multiple approaches with optimal complexity.

I'm feeling happy to not be part of such a team.

Questions asked in Data Structures round:

a. Given an array [5, 4, 6, 7, 9, 1]. For each element at index i in the array, find the next largest element at index j where j > i. If there is no element larger than the current element in the array, then put -1. Output: [6, 6, 7, -1, -1]

b. Given an array and an element k. Move all elements equal to k to the end of the list. Example: [4, 2, 1, 6, 7, 2, 1] Output: [4, 1, 6, 7, 1, 2, 2]