Sachdeva Medical Wholesale Interview Questions and Answers

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - It is a very bad company.....no job security,. politics is everywhere in this company.

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: We were supposed to come up with a solution whether this subsidy cut should take place or not. Initially everyone was given 1 minute to speak, 12 people in the group and I was the 10th to speak, this gave me sufficient time to think but on the same hand I had to make sure that I say something which the 9 people before me haven’t spoken, so it was a bit tricky. After that the floor was open for discussion for 10 minutes, make it a point that this is not a debate so its not necessary that you take a positions for or against the topic, I had made points both in the favor of the issue and against it and it was appreciated by the moderators.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I had to tell something about myself in not more than 45 seconds, so I focused more on my extra curricular activities and the volunteering work instead of academic achievements which I felt most of the other candidates too had a decent one.

Case: “Delhi airport has a terminal which is being utilized only upto 60% of its potential, still the authorities are planning to make a new terminal, what could be the reason behind it.” There can be numerous reasons to this, I gave a few good reasons and I was through. Like, the international flights are concentrated on a particular time of the day like at the night or early in the morning so during that time only one terminal might not be sufficient. Having more terminals would reduce the transit time and that will result in an efficient use of the runway and would smoothen the air traffic. I gave only these two reasons and tried to explain it in detail.

Round: Puzzle Interview
Experience: It was only me to whom a puzzle was asked and the interviewer assured me that he won't evaluate me on this. The puzzle was “there are 10 lions and a sheep on a lonely green island, sheep can eat grass and survive, lions can also survive on grass but that is they would like to do the least. Lions can eat the sheep but the catch is that which ever lion eats the sheep would turn into a sheep, now I am one of the lions so will I eat the sheep? Assume that all the lions are equally intelligent.” Although I had no clue how to solve this but I went ahead with the problem logically and the interviewer helped me, at the end I answered the question. There could be some tricky answers also to such questions which one should definitely say if you can think of any, like I said that “in the minds of all the lions there would be an element of fear for eating the sheep so I would think a step ahead and eat the sheep and the other lions
don't eat me due to this fear in their minds.”

Round: HR Interview
Experience: As soon as I entered the interviewer said “I remember you”, this was because we had some exchange of views during the ppt. In this round they made all the nine candidates solve the same case. It was about the truck industry in US, I was shown some data and graphs related to various business sectors in the industry and was asked to interpret things like why the profit margins are different in any two sectors, what would be the effect if a Japanese player comes in etc. To answer this having a basic knowledge of the terminologies would help a lot.

College Name: IIT KANPUR

Round: Test
Experience: The written round was based entirely upon Algorithms and Data Structures. 
Complexity of various operations were asked and a few aptitude questions were present. 
Nothing much was asked about Databases etc.

Round: Interview
Experience: The interview was 3 rounds of pure technical stuff. The questions were tough. Typically 2 or more questions were asked in each interview (atleast one of which would be a coding question which you had to solve and code within the time limit of 45 minutes for both questions).
I was initially asked about the Euler Tour and how I would code up a solution. I gave the standard graph theory solution for the same. The interview realized that I knew about the problem and switched the problem statement and gave me a problem that I had not encountered before. The idea was to give you an unseen problem and see how you cracked it. 

The problem was:- Given a series of overlapping intervals, generate all the event points and the set of intervals that were currently overlapping the event point. eg. for the intervals (1 3) (2 6) (2 4) (3 7)(8 9) the event points would be (1 - (1 3)) (2 - (1 3) (2 6)(2 4))(3 - (1 3)(2 6)(2 4)(3 7))(4 - (2 6)(2 4)(3 7))(6 - (2 6)(3 7))(7 - (3 7))(8 - (8 9))(9 - (8 9)). After solving this problem, I was asked about some general questions about designing distributed databases for a high volume application and distributed data centers and how to adjust for geographically distributed queries.

Round: Interview
Experience: In the 2nd technical interview round, the first question was an analytical one about proving or disproving a statement involving a grid of size 2^n by 2^n. The question asked whether it was possible to tile the grid using an L shaped tile of size 2x2 leaving just one square empty. The second question was to code up the delete node operation on a BST.

Round: Interview
Experience: This one was relatively easier where the question involved adding 2 numbers of equal number of base 10 digits stored as a singly linked list of digits. 
Allowed operations were only forward traversal of the linked list with O(1) extra space and a time better than 2 traversals of the linked list.

General Tips: Study hard (especially Algorithms, Graph Theory and Data Structures) for
the interviews. They don't care about HR stuff and they look for high CG candidates.
Skill Tips: Primary preparation was from 2 sources:
1) In the early stages (about 2 months before Day 0 of placements) - I read through Cormen et al
(Algorithms - MIT Press) and solved problems from Codechef and other sources. I also read through the TopCoder tutorials on Dynamic Programming, Graph Algorithms and Tree Based problems.
2) In the later stages (15 days before Day 0) - I read through the book "Algorithms for Interviews". It has a number of tough problems on DP, Graph theory and specialized algorithms for specific problems (eg. O(n) solutions for certain cases). Also, I went through the past year interview questions of all the CS companies available - MS, Adobe, Amazon etc. A few days before Day 0, I also went through my previous year notes on Operating Systems, Databases etc.
3) One thing that I neglected was implementing the code for basic data structures (Tree insert, delete etc.) but I should have done that as part of the preparation as I was caught off guard by one question about my basics. I would recommend reading C++ Data Structures and Algorithms by Lippman. (Some others also recommend C by Kerninghan and Ritchie as a way to brush up your language skills).
College Name: IIT-ROORKEE

Round: Test
Experience: You’ll find it easy if you are already preparing for CAT. It isn’t too tough and they test only core Indutrial Engineering knowledge.
Tips: 1. Prepare well for the test.
2. Take exam in groups.
3. Prepare for CAT and GRE.
4. Solve TIME test papers for speed.

Round: Interview
Tips: 1. Be confident.
2. Be clear about whatever you speak to them.
3. Memorise some real world example related to each topic. For example the use of the revolutionary algorithm and assembly line problems.

Skill Tips: There will be a section on mechanical engineering. IM students need to study for that. It’s better to have some managerial skills. Also be ready to write that you will work for a period of 10-15 years in TATA motors.
College Name: IIT KHARAGPUR