Adobe Interview Experience | Set 40 (On-Campus for MTS-1)

Online test:
Coding : Time : 90 minutes
There were three coding questions as follows:

1. A man starts from his house with a few pan cakes. let they be N. Now he visits K places before reaching home. At each place he can buy a cake, sell a cake or do nothing. But he must sell L cakes before reaching home.Find the maximum number of cakes he can have at any point in his journey.N,K,L are given as input
   ex: for 5 3 1 , output: 7
2. The exact question i don’t remember. You have to find the maximum contiguous subarray in an array. Basically a question on Kadane’s algorithm
   Solution: neveropen Link
3. There is a text. There is a pattern. The pattern contains a * symbol and it can be replaced by 0 or more letters(any letter) . For example if the pattern in aa*b the aaab, aab,aaccb,etc all are valid patterns.You have to find number of occurrences of the pattern in the text.

MCQ: 50 minutes
There were 45 questions based on logical reasoning, data interpretation and elementary mathematics. One advice is that start from the end, they are much easier than those in the beginning.

About 16 students were selected for interviews.

Round 1

The interviewer looked at my resume. Then directly moved to Data Structures and Algorithm.
1. He asked me about sorting algorithms.Then he asked me what is the difference between quick sort and merge sort and when to use what?
   I told him merge sort is stable and quick sort has a worst case complexity of o(n^2) but in quick sort we don’t need to merge sorted array. In case of arrays we use Quicksort and for linked lists we use merge sort
2. Write code for merge sort of a linked list containing floats
   Solution: neveropen Link
3. He then told me about bubble sort in linked lists by swapping of data in nodes and asked what is the problem here apart from complexity?
   I told that looked lists generally contain chunks of data so swapping data can cause considerable overheads and degrade performance. He seemed happy with the answer.
4. How is a float like 5.7 represented internally in the CPU?
   I had to tell about IEEE notations. I didn’t remember those so could not answer it.
5. Few questions on Operating Systems , Threads, Process, their difference , paging, etc
6. You have to write a generic Compare function for sorting. For example, suppose there is a Student class containing marks of Subjects X,Y,Z. you have to write a compare function for sorting based on any field that the user wishes.
   Hint:Use Function pointer
7. Two numbers are given you have to multiply them without using * operator and also tell the minimum number of additions required to do so.i gave an also but could not tell the minimum number of additions required.
   Solution: neveropen Link

Round 2
Again the interviewer looked at my resume and told i have done a good number of projects. But again no questions on my projects.

1. Design a Cache for storing any kind of data.
   As we do not know what data is to be stored , so we must return void pointers. Now first i implemented with an array. Then for page replacement i used LRU. For keeping track of least recently used element, i used a heap. I was told to further optimise it . So First represented the cache a heap then finally went ahead with a Doubly Linked List with addresses of nodes stored in a HashMap.Wrote codes for set and get functions for the cache and replacement also.
   The interviewer helped a lot and pushed me towards correct solution
2. A C code was given and i was asked to find the error. It was a tough one involving pointers and character alignment within the memory space and segmentation faults.
3. A few questions on function overloading
   Solution: neveropen Link
4. The arrival time and departure times of trains are given, you have to find the minimum number of platforms required for the trains.
   Solution: neveropen Link

Round 3
In this round, my internship project was discussed in details. Then the following questions were asked:

1. What happens when we often allocate and deallocate memory?
   There was a long discussion on how the OS allocates memory, fragmentations , how to avoid it (compaction).
2. how compaction works? he was asking for algo
   Told him that memory blocks can be represented by 0(free) and 1(occupied). Compaction would then mean moving all the 0s in the end. I told him the respective algo for array and linkedlist.
3. how deallocation occurs and what things should be taken care of during deallocation?
   I told him that instead of frequently allocating and deallocating memory, we can reuse it using realloc(). There were a few questions on realloc().
4. Why row major traversal of a very big array is faster than column major traversal?
   Told him the benefits it can have from internal caching
5. You have to cover a distance N. You can take 1,2 or 3 steps. Find number of ways of doing s0.
   Gave both the recursive and dp solution.
   Solution: neveropen Link

Round 4(Final HR round)

1. This was basically an HR round and questions like Why adobe?
2. If you get another job, how will you decide which one to accept ?
3. What is your location preference ? etc were asked.

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