This was a campus placement. The company came for two roles: Application Developer and Server Technology.

The first round was an MCQ online test. It was pretty easy, except for the flow diagrams, which were a bit tricky to solve.

The next round was the interview. It was conducted over a Zoom call.

In the first round of the interview, I was asked about myself, and I also told the interviewer about my projects. Then, he asked some basic data structure questions, and I answered them all. They were quite easy, honestly.

Next, he asked me to write a program to find the Kth largest element in a linked list. I had to think about this. The first thing that came to my mind was the extra work involved in sorting to find the "Kth largest" element.

I knew I had to use the partition scheme of quicksort to search for the element. But as I was explaining the approach, he stopped me and told me to just write the code.

I had 8 minutes to write the code. This included implementing the linked list class (5 minutes). When I was writing the function for it (a driver and a partition scheme function), he stopped me again and said time was up.

He later asked me for an explanation. I told him my approach, explaining that it was working perfectly fine and that we couldn't do better than O(n). After the interview, I was content with my explanation and later confirmed that it was indeed the optimal solution.

However, I wasn't called for the next round despite giving all the right answers. I was pretty depressed as to why I got rejected. I ruminated for a long time about where I went wrong and still can't figure it out.

Round 1 - MCQs

Contained aptitude, computer knowledge, and English questions.

Round 2:

What is the difference between stacks and queues?

What is the difference between arrays and linked lists? Which do you prefer?

(Coding) Write a program to find the Kth largest element in a linked list.