Recently, I joined Flipkart, Bangalore as a Software Developer. In this post, I’ll share my experience about the interview process, and how to approach the same. The steps are in order of chronology. I’ll make special mention in case of an order of priority.
#1 Preparation:
The most important thing to do for weight loss and for technical interview preparation is to find a good motivation. It could be as positive as the desire to work on new domains and challenges, or as negative as your current boss who sucks the spirit out of your soul.
In any case, make sure it is strong enough to make you give up sleep. The first thing, once the motivation sets in, is to update your resume and share it with InterviewBit. Next in, you need the right guidance.
There is obviously a general preparation you need to do – you need to brush up your Problem Solving, Data Structures, Algorithms; and lastly (optional) design skills. For a few of us, we might even need to brush up our coding skills.
Now that we’re past the general preparation, we need to focus on company specific preparation. Make sure you read up about the specific company and see if their problem statements and current openings interest you. If yes, then dig deeper into their interview process. Read about their interview rounds, what is their bar of expectations etc.
I’ll mention here about InterviewBit. The last point is where InterviewBit clearly trumps everyone else. The recruiters at InterviewBit don’t just throw random sentences like “Prepare on Algos”.. instead, they share details about the different rounds at the companies, sample questions asked in the past etc. This really helps you stand-out during the interview process.
#2 Flipkart Interview Process:
Flipkart has a quite thorough interview process for SDE-2s. Following were the rounds involved:
- Telephonic rounds: There are 1 or 2 telephonic rounds, depending on whether you’re a local candidate or an outstation one.
If you successfully clear the telephonic rounds, you’re called in for in-house interviews at Flipkart’s Bangalore campus. Following are the rounds I went through during the in-house process:
- Machine Coding: This was a round that I’ve seen only in Flipkart. You’re given a small problem statement and are expected to write working, production quality code for the same in 90 minutes. For SDE-2s, the expectation was that more than just working, the code should have a strong Object-Oriented design. This is a round that one can ace only if they really code a lot at work. 😉
- DS/Algo: This round focused on problem-solving and data structure knowledge.Again, the unique part was that this round focused a lot on my ‘problem-solving’, and not as much on the solution. Knowledge of data structures and a few standard algorithms is imperative to ace this round.
- Design: This round revolved around the interviewer asking me a fuzzy problem statement, and expecting a low-level design and API-calls details. A part of the solution is for the candidate to ask enough questions to make the problem statement more concrete, before jumping on to assumptions and/or solutions.
- Hiring Manager: This round revolved around a manager discussing my past projects, my contributions in my previous company, and my learnings from the same. This round does a deep dive on the projects in your resume (or if you prefer to discuss any other), so make sure you talk about projects that you really did 😉 There are also discussions on any initiatives you took in your previous company, and how they helped/made the situation worse for you and/or your peers.
#3 Offer and Joining:
If you do pretty well in all the above rounds, and amazingly well in at least one round, you stand a chance of getting an offer from Flipkart. Make sure you are honest about your current pay-scale, and your expectations. More often than not, Flipkart would do a good job of exceeding your expectations. If not, there’s always a room for negotiation. Here again, a special mention to the team at InterviewBit. They were in touch with me regarding the offer and helped me negotiate a better one by mediating between me and Flipkart. I liked how they were open to discussing other offers I’d scored, without going the InterviewBit route, and made really honest suggestions about pros and cons to each.