How to prepare for and ace the machine coding round? | Interview Tips

Machine Coding Round

Given the recent popularity of machine coding round, most of the top tech companies in India (Flipkart, Uber, Swiggy, Ola, Cred, etc.) have started adopting it into their interview process.

Since it is a relatively new interview format, very few candidates prepare for it and hence face elimination in this round.

Introduction

Machine coding round involves solving a design problem in a matter of a couple of hours.

It requires designing and coding a clean, modular and extensible solution based on a specific set of requirements.

An example of a machine coding problem could be to design a snake and ladder game with certain requirements and constraints.

This is generally followed by a code review process where an interviewer goes through the code and tries to understand the design decisions.


Preparation

Learn how to prepare for machine coding round at: How to prepare for machine coding round?

Learn how to practice for machine coding round at: How to practice for machine coding round?

Learn how to ace the machine coding round: How to ace the machine coding round?


Sample Machine Coding Questions

Problems

Solutions


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I actively write about interview preparation on LinkedIn as gcnit

My background:
Ex-Flipkart, SDE-II
Ex-Microsoft, SDE
workat.tech, Co-founder

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whats new in this ? oops and reable code thats it?

Do you mean OOP and readable code is the only difference compared to competitive programming?

That’s true in a way but the actual experience is completely different from a problem solving/data structures round.

I’d suggest you to try this problem to find out: Snake & Ladder - Machine Coding Round Practice Questions

If you’re up for it, please make sure that you write the solution with proper design and that the code is readable.

no bro im not comparing im asking is machine round means they consider testing knowledge on oops and analysing reability of the code…

Yes. Apart from problem solving, these are the general expectations of a good solution:

  • Code should be working and demonstrable.
  • Code should be functionally correct.
  • Code should be modular and readable.
  • Separation of concern should be addressed.
  • Code should easily accommodate new requirements and minimal changes.
  • There should be a main method from where the code could be easily testable.
  • A UI is generally not required.

You can read more about it at What is a machine coding round?

i read it already . btw i had frontend experience i know how important is reability of the code. what does this line mean?

This is regarding machine coding round for a backend role so a ui is not required in that case

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Many people often call this as Low Level Design round in which the interviewers are generally interested in knowing how good are you at structuring the software. This generally involves class structures, their use-cases and their dependencies which is highly used in OOP design.

Machine coding round is similar to low-level design round. The only difference being that in machine coding round, you actually need to write code. In a design round, you only need to design and tell what classes you’ll create and how they’ll interact usually on a whiteboard or on paper.

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Written something about the PS/DS (problem solving, data structures and algorithms) coding round as well. Do check it out.

Having been quite active in the interview preparation scene recently, I’ve observed that there is a lot of misconception around competitive programming in the context of interview preparation. So decided to write an article to clear these misconceptions.

How to prepare for technical interviews at companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Google, Microsoft, Swiggy, Uber, etc?

SDE I Interview Preparation: The Ultimate Guide | Interview Tips

I also had machine coding round ar CRED. This discussion helped me lot in cracking that round. Also this article is very helpful in clearing that round
Cred machine coding round 2022