I applied through Indeed and got a message for an in-person interview in the Chandigarh office.
Here's how the interview went:
Flow of the interview R1:
- What course are u doing?
- Tell me about yourself
- U can work with both C++ and Python?
- What’s the difference in C++ and Python?
- What are functions?
- Write down function for Fibonacci sequence (on paper) - I wrote recursive solution and said that we can use DP with tabulation to make it linear time complexity
- Asked if I have done DSA - I said yes, I’ve been practicing DSA for last 6 months
- DSA question - reverse left and right nodes of tree - Did it
- DSA - print leftmost nodes of tree - Attempted, but wrote wrong code, explained why it was wrong (before they said it was wrong)
- Tried fixing it, but couldn’t complete, so gave them a basic gist
- Another coding question - print all primes between a range - Used brute force instead of sieve of eratosthenes
- ML started now - asked what all you have done in ML?
- Have u worked with text? - told about Aura Spam and Phishing Models
- Why do we need to convert text to numbers before ML models and how can we convert them?
- What other ways do we have to convert categorical columns to numbers instead of One-Hot encoding? - talked about Label encoding
- They asked about pros and cons and when to use One-hot vs Label?
- Then we talked about PCA
- Then about K nearest neighbors
- Then about how to find best K in KNN (elbow in the graph)
- Then they gave a case study of a use case of classifying a website into a category and asked me to create a flowchart / pipeline of the whole process
- Discussed vector embeddings and how ChromaDB works (vector DB)
- Asked if I knew SQL and MongoDB and how much
- Asked difference between SQL and MongoDB and pros cons
- Talked about JSON
- Talked about data types in python (list, tuple, set, dictionary)
- Then shifted back to ML - SVM also (couldn’t answer very well)
- Talked about RESTFul APIs - answered well enough
This total took around 30 mins I think
Then R2:
- Talk with their CEO/Founder
- Had a full project discussion
- Told me they were gonna hire me as a browser developer (SDE) intern - which I liked
- Asked me to come on Monday, to which I said I'll join after a month (after my semester exams)
The interview was nice and everything was great, up until now. After this I was always told to wait a little while whenever I asked for my offer letter before joining. I was keeping another company's offer waiting as I liked this project. I let their CEO/Founder know that I have another offer but I'm prioritizing you, please send me the offer letter so that I can submit in my university.
Still no reply. Constant follow-ups from my side and they always changed the topic or told me to wait a few days.
I went to the office after my exams on the decided joining date, made me wait an hour (which is totally okay), then their lead HR came to me and told me that their CEO thought I was gonna join the other company (which I specifically told that I'm waiting on that offer still) and that they hired someone else instead of me (which is also totally fine, BUT why keep me hostage.
Thankfully I actually have the 2nd offer and the I talked to the other company and I'm going to join from tomorrow. But imagine if I didn't, I would have wasted this intern period of mine.
This company is a big RED FLAG. I'm not saying it isn't good for the people working there, but it wasn't for me. So for whomever's reading this, take caution and learn from my experience.