QuillBot Inc Interview Questions and Answers

Good Practice

Round duration - 120 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This was an online coding, mcq and debugging round round held on Amcat platform, there were 3 sections in the test.
1)20 MCQ questions {10 involving mathematics and the other 10 on programming fundamentals}; duration:20 mins;
you cannot navigate back to a questions after moving further, so have to answer carefully
2)debugging section- it involved 7 questions which were to be completed within 20 mins, 5 of them were very easy, each question only took almost a minute to figure out the problem with the code, last 2 questions were relatively moderate and there were errors at 3-4 sections of the entire code. I was able to solve all the questions in 15 mins
3)2 Coding questions- duration:80 mins, one was moderate on string while the other one involved dynamic programming, I was able to successfully execute all the available test cases.

Q1. 
Smallest Window Problem Statement
Given two strings, S and X, your task is to find the smallest substring in S that contains all the characters present in X.
Example:
Input:
S = "abdd", X = "bd"
Outpu...read more
Ans. 
Find the smallest substring in S that contains all characters in X.
• Use a sliding window approach to find the smallest window in S containing all characters of X.

• Maintain a hashmap to keep track of characters in X and their frequencies.

• Slide the window by moving the right pointer until all characters in X are found, then move the left pointer to minimize the window size.

• Return the smallest window found.

• Example: S = 'abd...read more
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Q2. 
Minimum Sum in Matrix Problem Statement
You are given a 2D matrix 'ARR' of size 'N x 3' with integers, where 'N' is the number of rows. Your task is to compute the smallest sum achievable by selecting one...read more
Ans. 
Find the smallest sum achievable by selecting one element from each row of a 2D matrix, following certain constraints.
• Iterate through each row and find the minimum element that does not violate the constraints.

• Keep track of the minimum sum achieved by selecting elements from each row.

• Avoid selecting elements directly beneath previously selected elements.
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Round duration - 45 minutes
Round difficulty - Hard

The interview started with introduction, there were two interviewers, they both introduced themselves and then asked me to introduce myself. Then we had a brief description on my projects, and they really appreciated my projects. Then as they were more concerned with DSA part, so we moved towards solving a coding problem. It was a famous rotten oranges problem with some change in language but as I haven't seen it beforehand, I wasn't able to give them an optimal approach and had to ask for some hints, but with a certain amount of help and hints, I was able to solve the problem and successfully coded it in 5 mins. Then the interviewers went for a dry run of the algorithm and tried to run it on each and every corner case, but as my algorithm was kind of bullet proof, it successfully passed all the corner cases.
Then they went for some questions on OOPS concepts involving inheritance and we had a long discussion on virtual function and runtime polymorphism. Then the interview was ended after a Q/A round that lasted for 3-4 minutes.

Q1. 
Rotten Oranges Problem Statement
Given a grid containing oranges in three possible states:
• Value 0 - Empty cell
• Value 1 - Fresh orange
• Value 2 - Rotten orange
Every second, any fresh orange adjac...read more
Ans. 
Given a grid with fresh and rotten oranges, determine the minimum time for all oranges to become rotten.
• Create a queue to store the coordinates of rotten oranges and perform BFS to rot adjacent fresh oranges

• Track the time taken to rot all oranges and return -1 if some fresh oranges remain

• Handle edge cases like empty grid or no fresh oranges present

• Example: For input grid = [[2,1,1],[1,1,0],[0,1,1]], the minimum time to...read more
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