My Interview Experience with Adobe
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Software Development Engineer | New Graduate 2021 | Off Campus
Recently I got an opportunity to interview with Adobe for their software engineer role for new graduates. Even though I did not make the final cut, the whole process turned out to be a great learning experience.
Adobe was a sponsor for virtual Grace Hopper Celebration India 2021, and conducted virtual open house sessions for the attendees. I was fortunate enough to be one among the 250 student scholars for vGHCI. During the session, employees from Adobe gave an insight on the company as well as the different job openings. They asked final year students and pre-final year students to send resumes to them for full time roles and internships respectively.
Round 1: Adobe SheCodes Hiring Drive Test
A few days after sending my resume, I got an invitation for an online test with a duration of 90 minutes which had to be taken sometime within a 48 hour window.
The test consisted of 4 sections: Quantitative Aptitude, Logical Ability, Verbal Ability and Programming.
The first 3 sections were MCQ and consisted of questions which were of easy to medium level. The final section consisted of one question similar to student attendance record and another question related to dynamic programming.
The main idea here is to manage time well. I tried to finish the first 3 sections as quickly as possible and spent more time on programming. I was able to pass all the test cases for the first question, but could only pass a few test cases for the second question as I ran out of time.
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Round 2: Technical Interview I
After a week from appearing for the test, I got a mail regarding the schedule of the interview which was to be held after two days. They had mentioned that they will be conducting interviews from 9 AM to 6 PM. My slot was at 1:30 PM, but they called me at 11 AM and asked me to join. I was a bit caught off guard, so I wasn’t able to perform as well as I had hoped to.
The interviewer asked me questions based on operating systems, computer networks, data structures and database management systems concepts. I had done projects using Java Play, Python Django and Python Flask, and he asked me to explain the difference between those frameworks.
Then he gave me a programming question :
Given an iron chain represented as an array, each element of the array is the cost of cutting the chain at the position to it’s left. Find the minimum cost in cutting the chain into 3 pieces (2 cuts).
How would the approach change if no adjacent cuts are allowed? How would it change if the chain was to be cut into more than 3 pieces?
While discussing the approach with the interviewer, I was asked to share my screen and type the code. The interview took around 40 minutes.
Round 3: Technical Interview II
An hour after I had completed the first interview, I received a mail saying that I was shortlisted for the next round which would be held during the afternoon on the same day.
The interviewer was very friendly and made me feel at ease. He asked me to introduce myself first. Since I had done projects using machine learning, he asked me questions based on basic machine learning concepts.
I got 3 programming questions and was asked to code all of them
- How would you find an element from a sorted array? Suppose the array has been rotated, how would you find the point of rotation? Then how would you find an element in such an array?
(Find Rotation Point on Interview Cake has a good explanation) - Print preorder traversal of a Binary Search Tree
- Print level order traversal of a Binary Search Tree
This round took around 30 minutes.
Round 3: Technical + Managerial
I received a mail later that evening saying that I was shortlisted for the third round scheduled for the next day morning.
This round had technical and managerial questions. The interviewer asked me to introduce myself and then asked me about what kind of technology and role I see myself working at Adobe. Then she asked about the projects in my resume in detail. I had done a project using Python Django and she asked me about it’s database design and entity relationships. She also asked me about the approach I would take if I needed a ‘frequently bought together items’ feature in the web store and asked me to explain in detail from the structure of the data to evaluation of the model.
The next set of questions were behavioural-based. She asked me what decisions I would take in some specific circumstances. I was also asked about why I wanted to work at Adobe. The interviewer seemed eager and friendly throughout the interview. She also asked about my involvement in extra-curricular activities like music.
The Results
Since this hiring drive was conducted off campus, I’m not sure about the total number of candidates who appeared for each round. Most of my fellow vGHCI student scholars got the opportunity to write the test and around 5 of us reached the third and final round. Two weeks after the final round of interviews, the results were announced and 2 of my friends got the offer.
I was hoping to make the final cut, but I’m delighted that I made it this far. The whole journey helped me improve my technical & interview skills and with each round of interview, I gained confidence. GHCI was held virtually this year, so I missed out on properly meeting and interacting with other student scholars and attendees. But through this hiring drive, I was able to connect with other scholars and get to know about them and their experiences. All of them were encouraging and we ended up being each others’ cheerleaders.
A Note on my Preparation
The interview process happened during my University exams, so I was short on time for preparation. These are some of the resources which were really helpful for me:
- Interview Cake
This site is amazing! I would totally recommend this to anyone who is going to appear for programming interviews. Although this course is expensive, it is available for free for three weeks in the GitHub Student Developer Pack.
The full course covers all of the important topics in coding and has some readings and a few coding exercises each. The explanations are easy to understand. For each of the coding exercise, the approach is hidden first. If we feel that we already have an answer, there are some ‘Gotcha’s’ which point out things to watch out for (like edge cases). If we’re not sure, we can check out the approach step by step. There is an editor in the same page with unit tests and it supports many languages.
- GeeksForGeeks
The main advantage of this site is that it contains a huge question bank, from computer science fundamentals to competitive coding questions. There are many articles on interview experiences too. I referred two free courses for practice: Must Do Interview Preparation and Placement Preparation Course. - PraKtiz Konfidence Aptitude Tests
My college provided aptitude test training sessions and practice tests through this organisation and it proved to be useful.
I hope this article is helpful to my readers and good luck to all those who are preparing for interviews!
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