NielsenIQ Interview Experience for Software Engineer | On-Campus 2021

NielsenIQ came to our campus for Software Engineer profile on September 2021 . It consists of mainly 3 rounds . Due to pandemic , all rounds were virtual .

Round 1 (Online Coding Test):

1. Online Test was conducted on codility platform ( https://www.codility.com/ ). Before the online test practice some questions on the codility platform. So, that you can be familiar with the environment .
2. It consist of only 3 coding questions ( 2 easy and 1 medium level ). You should have a habit practice of all standard questions from GFG related to Data Structures and Algorithms in order to solve these questions easily.
3. • It was based on Dynamic Programming. ( Medium ). Given an array ( Arr ) consisting of strings. Your function should calculate the length of longest string ( S ) such that
     • ( S ) is a concatenation of some strings from (Arr).
     • Every letter in ( S ) should be different.

     Link to similar question from GFG: https://www.w3wiki.net/maximize-length-of-the-string-by-concatenating-characters-from-an-array-of-strings/

   • It was an easy mathematical implementation based Question. ( Easy )

     Given an infinite sequence: The 0th element is 0 and the 1st element is 1. The successive elements are defined recursively. Each of them is the sum of the separate digits of the two previous elements. Given an integer N, your function should returns the N-th element of the above sequence.

     0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 12, 7, 10, 8, 9, ... 5 , 8

   • It was again an easy mathematical implementation based Question.( Easy ).

     Link to similar question from GFG: https://www.w3wiki.net/maximize-the-number-n-by-inserting-given-digit-at-any-position/

Suggestions : You should be able to give the best optimised solution as the platform contains hidden test cases for all the questions. Moreover, you can take your time to frame your algorithm as duration of the test is 2hrs.

I was able to solve all the 3 questions within given time.

Round2 (Technical Interview Round): Online Technical round was of One hour. Interviewer divided it into 4 sections . First section consists of introduction general questions from resume and projects.

Second section was coding round. Interviewer asked me to open my code editor and ask me to run the code there. It was a live coding round for in which for each question interviewer was going to provide the test cases. The questions were basic which was related to arrays and strings.

1. Given two strings , Check first string is reverse of other.
2. Given a string , Find all the repeating characters in the string.
3. Given a Number N , and array of 1 to N-1 elements in it. Find the missing number.

Third section was related to DBMS , Interviewer asked some concepts related to Normalization and Indexing. Then he asked me to write two basic queries related to joins.

Fourth section was related to puzzles, Interviewer asked me two standard puzzles from GFG which was again pretty easy to solve.

• Puzzle 1: https://www.w3wiki.net/puzzle-3-cuts-cut-round-cake-8-equal-pieces/
• Puzzle 2: https://www.w3wiki.net/puzzle-7-find-the-jar-with-contaminated-pills/

I was able to solve all the questions.

Suggestions : It is required to have basic knowledge of Data Structures and Algorithms to solve coding question easily. Moreover, interviewer look for confidence and way of delivering the answer . It is highly advisable from my side that stick to GFG’s coding practise sections, puzzles sections and also the core theory section for computer science fundamentals subjects.

Also during the interview try to make conversation with the interviewer. Think out loud and ask hints as well if required.

Round 3 (HR): HR round was take by one of the senior manager of the company . It consists questions from resume and projects. Moreover there were some behavioural and situation based questions as well.

Suggestions : Don’t try to fake anything. Confidently speak whatever interviewer is going to ask.

Result : Finally, I got full time job + internship offer as software engineer in NielsenIQ.