Company : Media.net
Role :SDE 1
Oppurtunity: On-Campus
Don't just focus on only one domain, instead do one, which you like the most, with more conviction and simultaneously explore other domains also.
Media.net Interview Experience
Media.net came to hire for 6-months internship + FTE roles to our campus in mid-August, for the role of Software Development Engineer. The process consisted of total 5 eliminatory rounds, 1 Online Assessment and then 4 rounds of personal interviews.
Online Assessment:
The assessment was of 90 mins and had a total of 3 questions which were of Leetcode hard level. I solved 2 questions fully and another one partially and got shortlisted for the interviews along with 9 other candidates.
Media.net First round of Interviews:
The first round of interview was based on CS fundamentals and DSA. The interviewer introduced himself and then I gave my introduction after which he moved on to the CS fundamental based questions. This went on for roughly 10-15 mins where I was asked questions on topics like Operating System, DBMS and Computer Networks. This section of interview was relatively on the easier side. After this, he gave me a DSA question which I would rate around 1700-1800 on Codeforces. I was required to come up with a O(n*log(n)) solution, which took me around 45 mins and atleast a couple of hints from the interviewer. Once I arrived at the solution, I was asked to code it up and was able to do so within 5 mins and I feel this was one of the major reasons for him to pass me on to the next round. The question was based on 2-pointers. 2 people out of 10 got shortlisted to the next round, including me.
Media.net Second round of Interviews:
It was also based on the same format as of round 1, with the interviewer starting with CS fundamental questions for 10-15 mins and then he moved on to the DSA question, which on the first glance looked very much complicated. I took my time to understand the question and dry run the test-cases. Even after explicitly asking the interviewer about the constraints he just specified that you could assume the value to be very less. This made me think that I can use recursion for the problem. Once I came up with the brute force approach which was recursion and working in a time complexity of O(n! * 2^n), I realized that there were some overlapping subproblems and so it stuck me what if I could use bitmask DP, something that one would wish not to encounter ever ;). I took my time to convince myself as well as the interviewer that there were overlapping subsequences and hence, we could use Bitmask DP because the value of “n” was specified to be very less. Turns out I was correct and thus he asked me to code my solution. I implemented the solution within the time frame but forgot to memoize the solution, but he said that the code was enough. After this solution I was pretty sure that I would move to the 3rd round.
Media.net Third round of Interviews:
This was more of a System Design round where the interviewer started with CS fundamental questions again and this time, he also asked me about my projects and we also had a discussion for the search functionality on one of my projects for 5-10 mins. The he moved on to the system design question which was a slight variation of LRU Cache problem. It was more of a discussion round where he gave me the requirements and I was suggesting approaches. We discussed this question for around an hour, and I wrote the final code at the end after he was satisfied with all the functionalities of my system and the use of appropriate data structure. This interview lasted for 1.5 hours instead of an hour which was conveyed earlier. I got the confirmation for HR round after an hour but since it was already 9PM, my last interview was shifted for the next day. I was the only one who qualified for the HR round.
Media.net Final and fourth round of Interviews:
This was an HR round and 2 of the University recruiters took this round where they asked general and situation-based questions. These were similar to the questions which you find when googling “common HR round questions”. It lasted for around 45 mins. I was most anxious of this round because previously I had being rejected from 2 HR rounds even though I consider myself with decent communication skills. After a few hours in the evening I received the call that I was selected for the role.
Prepare core CS fundamental topics properly as it asked in many companies. Also, placements and internships are more about one getting lucky so don't lose hope one day you'll also get lucky, just keep on learning and practicing 🙂
