Sabre India Campus Placement Drive/Interview Experience

Recently Sabre India came to my campus for recruitment. They had 4 rounds.

ROUND 1

It was a coding test comprising of two coding questions and MCQs.

1. (20 Marks) https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-instance-15-puzzle-solvable/

2. (50 marks) Given a matrix comprising of 0’s,1’s, and 2, find out the minimum distance between the starting position and any of the boundary cells of the matrix.
Here, the cell marked 2 is the starting position.
The cells containing 1’s are plants and one should not step over such plants.
The cells containing 0’s are valid cells to move to.
The objective is to find the shortest path between the starting cell and any of the boundary cells without stepping on plants or the cells containing 1’s. One can move only in adjacent cells containing 0’s.

Input:
4 5
1 1 0 1 1
1 0 0 2 1
0 0 1 0 1
1 0 1 0 1
Output:
2

3. (98 marks) There were 40 MCQs on aptitude, blood-relation questions, permutations and combinations, OS, Computer Networks, DBMS.

I solved the 2nd coding question of 50 marks based on BFS on matrix, and several MCQs. Approximately 20 students were shortlisted for the next round.

ROUND 2

This round was Technical Interview. It lasted for about 1 hr for each candidate. The questions asked in this round to me were as following:

1. Explain the working of your code of Round 1 with a test case. Detailed discussion on how can you optimize it even further.
2. I got a few options from Computer Science Curriculum and had to select two of my most preferred courses for answering the next few questions. I selected Object-Oriented Programming and Database Management Systems. So questions followed on these courses. What is Encapsulation? What is Abstraction? Difference between the two and real-world examples of the two.
3. What is Polymorphism?
4. How to prevent a class from being inherited?
5. What is the difference between DBMS and RDBMS?
6. What are the different types of Normal forms? Explain all with examples.
7. What is the error thrown when you delete the primary key which is a foreign key in another table?
8. A question was given and I was asked to write pseudo-code for it in the least time complexity. The question was this: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/longest-even-length-substring-sum-first-second-half/
9. How can you identify and fix bugs in a program?
10. Do you have any particular idea or topic on which you would like to work on in life?

I had answered all the questions almost, so I moved to the next round.

ROUND 3 AND ROUND 4

Selected students after Technical Interview Round moved to Managerial round which was combined with HR round due to constraint of time. This interview lasted for 1–1.5 hr.

1. Write pseudocode to print the nth row of Pascal’s Triangle.
2. Write code in your preferred language for summation of data of Binary tree nodes lying in the same vertical line.
   https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/vertical-sum-in-a-given-binary-tree/
3. Out of the projects mentioned on your resume, explain one project in detail. I explained my Machine Learning based project. Questions followed which lead to a wholesome discussion on the implementation of the project.

Then there was the HR round simultaneously. The questions asked were:

1. What were your thoughts when you were explaining your solution to Sir?
2. Describe yourself in 2 minutes.
3. What are the qualities which best represent you?
4. Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
5. What are your expectations from this job from Day 1 to Day 365 in the company?

After 4 complete and thorough rounds, 5 students were selected from my college and I was one of them.