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Agoda | Staff Software Engineer | Bangkok | Nov-2024 | Reject

Screening Round

Questions: The recruiter asked about my current work, expectations, and openness to relocation during a 45-minute MS Teams call.

Candidate's Approach

No approach provided.

Interviewer's Feedback

No feedback provided.


Coding Round

Questions: I don't remember the exact question, but it was like there given two strings s1 and s2 and I need to find the longest palindrome possible from both the strings and then merge them and then find the shortest palindrome from the merged string (couldn't find this question anywhere). There were 18 test cases, and I needed to pass at least 10 to move ahead.

Candidate's Approach

I tried almost everything to solve this and took a lot of time but couldn't figure out anything. Later, I figured out a trick where I merged both strings as they are and then found the shortest palindrome out of the merged string. While I was explaining/coding this up, the interview was very strict that this approach wouldn't work for any of his test cases, and we wasted a lot of time during the discussion. I finally convinced him that this should work as towards the end we are only bothered about the final shortest palindrome from the merged string.

Final Outcome: It passed 3 of the test cases that the interviewer gave but was running into an out-of-bound error for one of the hidden cases. I had 7 minutes left, and the interviewer said he leaves it up to me to fix the out-of-bound error but said he is convinced that the solution will work. So I left, and we discussed culture and other stuff about Agoda.

Interviewer's Feedback

No feedback provided.