PayPal Software Developer Intern Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

5 MCQ questions, and 1 coding question similar to Leetcode medium-hard level (topic-greedy).

Q1. Basic DSA questions related to strings, linkedlists, binary search etc.
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Q2. Questions related to resume
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Technical round that lasted for around 60 minutes. The interviewer asked me questions based on DSA and OOPS concepts.

Q1. 
Dijkstra's Shortest Path Problem
Given an undirected graph with ‘V’ vertices (labeled 0, 1, ... , V-1) and ‘E’ edges, where each edge has a weight representing the distance between two connected nodes (X,...read more
Ans. 
Dijkstra's Algorithm basically starts at the source node and it analyzes the graph to find the shortest path between that node and all the other nodes in the graph.
The algorithm keeps track of the currently known shortest distance from each node to the source node and it updates these values if it finds a shorter path.
Once the shortest path between the source node and another node is found, that node is marked as "visi...read more
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Q2. What is the difference between C and C++?
Ans. 
1. The C programming language is a procedural language type while C++ is an object-oriented programming language type.
2. C programming follows a top to down programming approach that focuses on the steps rather than the data. C++ follows a bottom-to-top approach that focuses on data rather than the overall procedure.
3. Since C is a structured programming language the program is divided into separate blocks known as fun...read more
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Q3. What is the difference between malloc and new?
Ans. 
1. new calls constructor while malloc does not calls constructors 
2. new is an operator. malloc () is a function.
3. new returns exact data type while malloc() returns void *
4. On failure, new throws bad_alloc exception. While malloc() on failure, returns NULL.
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Q4. What is a virtual function?
Ans. 
A C++ virtual function is a member function in the base class that you redefine in a derived class. It is declared using the virtual keyword. It is used to tell the compiler to perform dynamic linkage or late binding on the function. A 'virtual' is a keyword preceding the normal declaration of a function. When the function is made virtual, C++ determines which function is to be invoked at the runtime based on the type
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Technical round that lasted for around 60 minutes. The interviewer asked me questions based on SQL and OOPS concepts.

Q1. Write a query to find the nth highest salary from a database.
Ans. 
TOP keyword can be used to find the nth highest salary. By default ORDER BY clause print rows in ascending order, since we need the highest salary at the top, we have used ORDER BY DESC, which will display salaries in descending order. Again DISTINCT is used to remove duplicates. The outer query will then pick the topmost salary, which would be your Nth highest salary.
SQL query : 

SELECT TOP 1 salary
FROM ( 
SEL...read more
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Q2. What is the difference between Stack and Heap in the context of Object-Oriented Programming (OOPS)?
Ans. 
1. Stack is a linear data structure whereas Heap is a hierarchical data structure.
2. Stack memory will never become fragmented whereas Heap memory can become fragmented as blocks of memory are first allocated and then freed.
3.Stack memory is allocated in a contiguous block whereas Heap memory is allocated in any random order.
4. Stack variables can’t be resized whereas Heap variables can be resized.
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

HR round that lasted for around 30 minutes. The interviewer asked questions to know more about me. We also discussed a puzzle.

Q1. You have two hourglasses, one measuring 7 minutes and the other measuring 11 minutes. How can you measure exactly 15 minutes using only these hourglasses?
Ans. 
1. At 0 minutes: Start both hourglasses at the same time.
2. At 4 minutes: 4 minutes hourglass runs out and flip it. 7 minutes hourglass is left with 3 minutes.
3. At 7 minutes: 4 minutes hourglass is left with 1 minute. 7 minutes hourglass runs out and flip it.
4.At 8 minutes: 4 minutes hourglass runs out and 7 is filled with 6 minutes and 1 minute on the other side. Flip it as the sand is left with 1 minute.
5. At 9 minu...read more
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Round duration - 75 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Simple question based on strings was given. MCQs based on basic aptitude and programming questions were asked. 
Tips: Time management is important. Remember all the syntaxes

Q1. 
Reverse the String Problem Statement
You are given a string STR which contains alphabets, numbers, and special characters. Your task is to reverse the string.
Example:
Input:
STR = "abcde"
Output:
"e...read more
Ans. 
This can be done by iterative swapping using two pointers. The first pointer points to the beginning of the string, whereas the second pointer points to the end. Both pointers keep swapping their elements and go towards each other. Essentially, the algorithm simulates the rotation of a string with respect to its midpoint.
Time Complexity : O(n)
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

It was a good experience.
Tips: If you don't know something just tell them. Don't try to answer something if you don't know anything about it

Q1. 
One Away Transformation Problem
Given two strings, A and B, determine whether A can be transformed into B by performing at most one of the following operations (including zero operations):
1. Delete a ch...read more
Ans. 
The idea is to create a new character array and copy the characters from the original String before the given position
After that, we put the new character at the position and copy the rest of the characters from the original String in the subsequent positions of the new array.
Other option can be to directly use the already defined methods such as insert().
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Q2. 
Remove Duplicates from String Problem Statement
You are provided a string STR of length N, consisting solely of lowercase English letters.
Your task is to remove all duplicate occurrences of characters i...read more
Ans. 
Hashing can be used to approach this problem.
Use a hash map and maintain count of the occurrences of all the characters in the string which character as the string and count as the value. At last, traverse the hash map and print all those characters with count > 1. 
Time Complexity : O(N) where N is the length of the string
Space Complexity : O(N)
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

It was easy. I could answer the first question. Second one I answered really badly