Cognizant Software Developer Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 180 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

The first round was based on algorithms, pseudo-codes, 2-3 questions from DBMS and CN, 3 coding questions, and 3 DBMS queries.

Q1. 
Minimize Hamming Distance Problem
Ninja has strategically formed a team to combat enemies in his city. Each ninja in the team has a specific range of attack, and the team has successfully acquired the att...read more
Ans. 
Minimize Hamming distance between two arrays by swapping elements at allowed indices.
• Iterate through allowed swaps and swap elements in ninja array accordingly.

• Calculate Hamming distance between ninja and enemies arrays after swaps.

• Return the minimum Hamming distance obtained.
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Q2. 
Number of Islands Problem Statement
You are provided with a 2-dimensional matrix having N rows and M columns, containing only 1s (land) and 0s (water). Your goal is to determine the number of islands in t...read more
Ans. 
Count the number of islands in a 2D matrix of 1s and 0s.
• Use Depth First Search (DFS) or Breadth First Search (BFS) to traverse the matrix and identify connected groups of 1s.

• Maintain a visited array to keep track of visited cells to avoid revisiting them.

• Increment the island count each time a new island is encountered.

• Consider all eight possible directions for connectivity between cells.

• Handle edge cases like out of bo
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Round duration - 45 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

It was a TR+HR round .
The interviewer started with “Tell me about yourself”. Then he asked some Java fundamental questions then he sked me the lifecycle of Software development. In HR round I was asked about what I know about Cognizant why I want to join this particular company, Am i okay with relocation, How can I contribute to companies growth etc.

Q1. 
Nth Fibonacci Number Problem Statement
Calculate the Nth term in the Fibonacci sequence, where the sequence is defined as follows: F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), with initial conditions F(1) = F(2) = 1.
Input:
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Ans. 
Calculate the Nth Fibonacci number efficiently using dynamic programming.
• Use dynamic programming to store and reuse previously calculated Fibonacci numbers.

• Start with base cases F(1) and F(2) as 1, then calculate subsequent Fibonacci numbers.

• Optimize the solution to avoid redundant calculations by storing intermediate results.

• Time complexity can be reduced to O(N) using dynamic programming.

• Example: For N = 5, the 5th F
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