← Interview experiences
Rejected
RejectedSDE at Paytm
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 0-1 Weeks
- Rounds
- 1
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Company Website
How it went
- Stay Calm Under Pressure even the problem looks intimidating, take a pause, clarify requirements, and think through the logic before coding
What they would tell you
- Stay Calm Under Pressure even the problem looks intimidating, take a pause, clarify requirements, and think through the logic before coding
How to prepare
- Practice medium-to-hard (sliding window, backtracking) DSA problems thoroughly
Round by round
- 1
Coding Round (DSA)60 min
interviewer started with a quick discussion about my background, work experience, and tech stacks. After getting a brief overview, he quickly jumped into the coding questions. Problem one: Longest Substring With At Most K Distinct Characters
- Approach: I used the sliding window technique with a hashmap to track character frequencies.I coded it up, explained my thought process, and the interviewer was satisfied with both approach and implementation. Problem two: Maximum Sum Combination At first glance, I panicked a little but stayed calm, the interviewer provided helpful hints, allowing me to brainstorm the solution systematically. I identified the backtracking logic, laid out the base cases, and started implementing the solution.While I was able to write a working base solution, I could not optimize it fully, which was ultimately the reason I got rejected.
What came up
MediumRemote1 2 years
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.