My first Interview Experience with Media.net

Today I am going to share my first Interview Experience with Media.net for Summer Internship. Media.net visited our campus in the first week of August, 2019 for Internship and Placements. There were total four rounds, two coding tests of 1.5 hours each, 1 Technical Interview of 1 hour and 1 HR+Technical of 50 minutes. A total of more than 150 prefinal year students registered for Media.net and finally 6 got selected.

Round 1 (Coding Round, 1.5 hours):

Question-1:
N strings of varying lengths are given. Each character used in the strings has some value. The value of a string is the sum of all characters used in that string. Given a length L, we have to use a subset of the given strings so that the total length of the strings used is L and the sum of values of all strings is maximised.
Hint: Knapsack

Question-2:
There are N ships, each with some seats S[i] (1≤i≤N). There are M passengers who want to buy the tickets for ships standing in a queue. The price of the ticket for a particular ship is always equal to the vacant seats in the ship. We have to find the maximum and minimum costs possible if all M passengers buy tickets.
Hint: Sorting

Question-3:
There are N nodes in a graph. They are connected using directed edges. For each vertex i (1≤i≤N), we have to determine whether there exists a path such that starting from vertex i, we reach vertex i again.
Hint: Topological Sort, O(N)

Round 2 (Coding Round, 1.5 hours):

Question-1:
Given a 2D array of size N*M, we have to return the maximum area from the array such that the elements in that area increase as we go right in the row and down the column.
Hint: DP, Stacks, O(max(M,N)²)

Question-2:
There is a dictionary which contains some words. We are given a start word A and an end word B, both belonging to the dictionary. We are to determine the minimum number of moves so that we reach B starting from A, provided the intermediate words are all in the dictionary. Allowed operations are insertion of a character, deletion of a character, modification of a character.
Hint: BFS

Question-3:
A vehicle has to reach x = D starting from x = 0. The vehicle can store infinite amount of petrol. The vehicle has P_initial units of petrol initially. 1 unit distance can be travelled using 1 unit of petrol in 1 min, or by dragging the vehicle in 5 min. There are N petrol pumps in between the source and destination. The amount of petrol at station i is P[i] (1≤i≤N). Filling the vehicle’s petrol tank takes K mins. Find the minimum time in which we can reach B.
Hint: 2D DP

After the coding rounds, 20 students were selected for Interviews.

Round 3 (Technical Interview, 1 hour):

The first question that interviewer asked me was “Tell me about yourself?”. Then he took a look at my resume and asked a question related to a project. Then he gave me a puzzle.

Puzzle:
You are in a 100 floors building. There is a special floor below which if we drop an egg, it will not break otherwise it will break. You have 2 eggs. Answer the minimum number of throws to get the value of required floor.

Question:
Given n floors and k eggs, find the minimum number of steps to find the floor below which if egg is dropped it will not break otherwise it will break.

Initially I didn’t knew the approach and progressively reached the solution and optimized it after which I was told to write the code on paper.
Here is the solution:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/egg-dropping-puzzle-dp-11/

After this I was asked to explain my solutions for the coding round tests.

Round 4 (HR + Technical Interview, 50 minutes):

The interview started with the interviewer asking me some HR questions such as “Tell me about yourself?” and “Tell me about a problem that you faced and how you fixed it?”. After this I was asked a question related to my previous Work Experience. Then the interviewer went into details regarding a project and asked me questions such as “What is the difference between normal CNNs, 3-D CNNs and FNNs?” and other Deep Learning related questions.

Then, I was asked two question:
Question 1:
A rank array is made from an array arr which is a permutation of 1 to N in such a way that rank[i] denotes the count of numbers smaller than arr[i] in the left the array from position i. You are given the rank array and you have to find the original array from it.

Question 2:
You are given a big array of size 100 gb and the main memory in your computer is 4 gb and the page size is 4 mb. You have to sort the array. How will you do it?

After answering both of these questions, I was asked if I had any questions.

And that was it! After some time, I was congratulated by the HR that I have been hired as a summer intern in Media.net. A total of 6 students from our batch got selected for internship at Media.net.

I would like to thanks Team Demux, my friends and Family for their guidance and support throughout the prepration and internship process.

If you have any doubts, you can ask me in the comments.