Round 1:

PayPal visited our campus in September for placement tests. An online test was conducted on the HackerRank platform. The criteria to sit in this test was a CGPA above 7.5 (all branches). The test included 11 MCQs (in Java) and 1 coding question. The time allotted for this test was 1 hour and 30 minutes. The MCQs were on OOP concepts (code in Java was given; you needed to predict the output). The coding question was on bitmasking DP.

Coding Question: There is a class and 'n' students in that class. All students are going to stand in a row. Now, each student 'i' has some internal energy with any student 'j' where 1 ≤ i ≤ n, 1 ≤ j ≤ n, i ≠ j, and n ≤ 10. You need to tell in what order the students should stand to minimize the internal energy of the whole class.

Round 2:

Twelve students were selected for further interview rounds in December. In the first round, after a little chit-chat about PayPal, the interviewer asked me one coding question:

Coding Question:- There is a river with width 'x', and there are some stones placed across the river. You are given the position of each stone. Now, you start from one of the banks, and you can have three types of jumps: (last_jump - 1, last_jump, last_jump + 1) (at the start, last_jump = 0). You need to tell whether you can cross the river or not. (Approach: Use simple recursion and then convert it to DP).

Basically, data structures.