Fresher / Campus Interview Prep & Rubrics

The entry-level loop: CS core subjects, DSA, one language in depth, and the HR round that campus candidates treat as an afterthought.

The loop, in order

CS Fundamentals17 questions · 6 topicsThe core-subject rounds common in campus hiring and still used to probe depth in experienced interviews.
Data Structures & Algorithms44 questions · 16 topicsDSA interview questions organised by tested pattern: arrays, hashing, rotated arrays, dynamic programming, graphs, heaps and sliding windows, so you learn transferable coding-round techniques instead of memorising puzzles.
Java & Spring28 questions · 10 topicsLanguage and framework depth for JVM roles, covering the internals that separate framework users from engineers who understand what runs underneath.
Databases & SQL25 questions · 8 topicsQuery-writing rounds and the storage-engine reasoning behind why a query is slow, for backend, data, and DBA roles alike.
Behavioural & Culture Fit21 questions · 8 topicsThe round candidates most often under-prepare, treated as a skill with structure rather than small talk, including the rubric interviewers score against.
HR, Screening & Offer18 questions · 6 topicsThe recruiter and HR rounds that gate the technical loop and decide your compensation, where most candidates improvise and lose money.

Latest for this track

mediumCodingConcept

Edit distance where insert costs 1, delete costs 2 and replace costs 3. Define the DP state and the recurrence, and tell me what changes from the classic version.

The state is unchanged - the minimum cost to transform the first i characters of one string into the first j of the other - because the subproblem structure does not depend on what operations cost. Only the recurrence changes, adding a per-operation weight instead of a uniform 1, and the base cases become multiples of the insert and delete costs rather than i and j.

Dynamic Programming4 minmid, senior

hardScenarioConcept

A Spring Data repository method looks like one clean line, but the endpoint issues several hundred queries per request. How do you diagnose the N+1, and what would you actually change?

The repository call fetches parents in one query; the extra queries come later, when something touches a lazy association - usually the JSON serialiser, with open-session-in-view keeping the context alive so it succeeds silently. Diagnose by counting statements per request, then fix with a join fetch or entity graph, batch fetching, or a DTO projection.

Spring Data And Jpa4 minmid, senior, staff

hardConceptScenarioDesign

A table has forty million rows, thirty-five million of them soft-deleted, and every query for active rows has got slower. Would a partial index help, and what would you have to be careful about?

A partial index only contains rows matching its predicate, so indexing WHERE deleted_at IS NULL stores five million entries instead of forty million - smaller, shallower, and far likelier to stay cached. The catch is the planner only uses it when it can prove the query predicate implies the index predicate, and it does nothing about dead rows still in the heap.

Indexing5 minmid, senior, staff

hardConceptScenario

Two doctors can go off call only if at least one remains. Both check the rule at the same moment, both see two doctors on call, and both go off call. What isolation problem is this, and what actually fixes it?

This is write skew: two transactions read the same set, each writes a different row, and the pair commits a state neither would have produced alone. No row-level constraint can catch it because the invariant is a property of the set, so the fix is either serializable isolation, a lock on something both transactions must touch, or remodelling the invariant onto a single row.

Transactions And Isolation6 minmid, senior, staff

mediumBehaviouralScenario

Tell me about a decision you had to make in minutes, with information you knew was incomplete.

Name the clock and what it was costing, say which facts you had and which you chose not to wait for, classify the call as reversible or not, act at the level you were authorised to and say so, and record the reasoning at the time so it can be judged on what you knew.

Pressure And Ambiguity6 minmid, senior, staff, lead

hardConceptScenario

Your GC log shows a stop-the-world pause far longer than the collection work inside it. Where did the rest of the time go?

Most likely into reaching the safepoint. Every application thread has to arrive at a poll point before the operation can begin, and one late thread stalls all of them, so the pause is time-to-safepoint plus the actual work. Safepoint logging separates the two.

Jvm Internals5 minsenior, staff, lead