Expedia Internship Interview Experience | On-Campus 2021

Expedia visited our campus for a recruitment drive, providing an exciting opportunity for students to showcase their skills and secure positions in their esteemed organiza...

Expedia visited our campus for a recruitment drive, providing an exciting opportunity for students to showcase their skills and secure positions in their esteemed organization. Education: Btech 3rd year ECE student of Tier-2 Online Test via Hackerrank: The online test was proctored and we were not allowed to switch between the tabs or copy past our code on the editor. 120 mins test with three coding questions. 2 easy, one medium. The two easy ones are one from array n and the other from string. The medium one is a knight chess problem. The starting and ending coordinates of the knight were given, and we need to find the minimum number of moves to reach the ending coordinate from the starting coordinate. This was a dp problem. I solved all three problems quickly without any difficulty. Out of 200+ students, 46 students we shortlisted for interviews.

Technical Round 1 via Zoom Meeting: Time duration was 45 mins, and the interview asked only one coding question. Question Asked: You are given a list of numbers in the form of a string array. Find the largest possible number that can be created by appending these numbers one after another. First I thought of an example : ["2","41"]. I asked myself which number would come first, the "41" one. Why? As "41" is lexicographically larger than "2,". So the final answer is "412". So my final approach lexicographically sorted the array in decreasing order and appended all the strings in the order. My interviewer then asked me to code it. The interviewer also asked me what improvements could be made to my code. Suppose you are writing code in a project, then what coding practices should you follow? I said I would document my code, and then he told me what more? I could not think of anything, so he said you should use proper naming conventions and not duplicate your code as well. The interviewer told me that you are going to the

next round.

Technical Round 2 via Zoom Meeting: The time duration was 45 mins, and the interview asked two coding questions. Question 1: Evaluate a given postfix expression, a famous question on the stack. As soon as I got the question, I told my approach, and then the interviewer asked me to code it and its time and space complexity. He was satisfied by my approach. Question 2: Word Search . You are given a 2-D grid of characters and a string, and you need to find whether, upon traversing the grid, you can find the word or not?.

Note: from a cell, you can only go to adjacent cells with common edges. So I coded this problem using backtracking. He asked me about the time and space complexity. I said O(4^nm) time and O(nm) space. But then he corrected, and the final time complexity was O(4^|word|). He was also satisfied with my approach.

HR round via Zoom Meeting: After the 2nd technical round, I got a phone call from the Expedia recruitment team, and they scheduled my HR round meeting with the product manager. She asked about myself and my hobbies. Then she asked about my location of living. Then she asked me where do you see yourself after five years. I said that in 1st three years, I would gain domain expertise, and in the next two years, I will explore other domains of the company. Then she gave me a scenario where you and your friends are working on a project, and during the final production, you see there is an issue with your friend's code; then what would you do?. Then we talked about the company a bit, and it ended after 45 mins as well. Out of 46 students, 20 students got selected for the internship, and guess what? One of them was me. Some bonus points: Don't stress yourself and be calm when answering. Always follow good coding standards like proper naming conventions. Tell the time and space complexity of your approach even if they don't ask it. If you get stuck, the interviewer will help you.