How I cracked my Sahaj Interview?
While I was in college, I always imagined getting a job in a place where I could do everything meaningful, write code, tests, deploy etc…where I was going to explore multiple domains. While I was enjoying the work at my first organisation, I felt like I was missing something that I wanted. During one of my conversations with my college batchmate Kirti, I got to hear about Sahaj Software. The information I got, made me think if this is what I looked for. Going through glassdoor reviews and after interaction with many of my seniors, I started preparation for Sahaj after I got some experience.
Phase 1: Preparing for the interview at Sahaj Software
I started with the preparation of the core subjects of Computer Science. Having an idea about how the Sahaj interview is conducted, I started focusing on the core. I studied Data Structures, Object-Oriented Programming, DBMS, etc. Also as I have had some experience with Scala and AWS, So, I went through all the work I have done on this also to refresh my memory.
To sharpen my coding skills further, I started with coding practice on the GeeksforGeeks platform. I once read a quote by Kent Beck which has stayed with me in my mind and kept encouraging me, the quote is “I wasn’t a great programmer but a programmer with great habits.”
Programming was something I was doing regularly at work and was comfortable with it and this helped me during the complete Sahaj interview phase. Working and studying for the interviews simultaneously is not easy and it took a considerable amount of effort. I was not at all a morning person. So I used to stay awake late at night to study for the interviews. Even in the office lunch breaks, I used to discuss the data structures and OOP concepts with my friends there.
Those late nights of study helped me crack the interviews.
Phase 2: Getting a call from Sahaj for an interview
In parallel, I started to approach Sahajeevis for a chance for an interview.
Right from my engineering days, I followed one of the Sahajeevi Priyank Gupta, I enjoyed Priyank’s blogs about OOP on Tumblr. I always found them very informative and easy to understand.
I thought of messaging him on LinkedIn about my interest to be part of Sahaj and as they say, what you seek, is what you get!
When I pinged Priyank on LinkedIn he asked if I was interested to be a part of Sahaj and asked to share my resume, to see if my profile fits in and Voila! got a chance for a Sahaj Interview.
Phase 3: The Call from Sahaj Software
It all began with a call from an Org. builder(recruiter) in Sahaj who explained to me the complete interview process. I got a coding problem to solve as per my convenience and at my own pace no time pressure at all. So I decided to do it in a cool way. I had thought a lot about the approaches to solve the problem. And I wrote code and submitted it in 3 days. I got the response back in a week about the solution and was given feedback to make some changes in the code.
Before I went with making the changes first I understood the reason behind the changes that were asked to make because to do the change you must know why to change, else it would need a discussion if I wasn’t convinced with the reason for change.. After understanding all the reasoning I completed the changes and submitted again. I waited eagerly for the call for further rounds and after a little, while the phone call came, the interview date was decided.
Now I started with revising all that I studied. I was with my family when I got a call for an interview. It was around the Diwali holidays. Also, I went to the Sahaj website and read about the company. With lots of preparations and prayers, I went to the Sahaj Office, Pune.
Phase 4: The face to face interaction at Sahaj Software, Pune
Round 2 of the interview is a face to face code pairing round, the round started and the discussion went around refactoring the solution for the problem that I had solved in the earlier round, this round went on for an hour. It was quite interesting and we refactored the code to some extent in the end. Sahajeevis believe in clean code practices and mine was not that good. Some functions had very long approaches for solving the problem that could have been optimized. The pair gave me hints and I had to refactor the solution then and there incorporating the acceptable suggestion post our discussion. After this round I was a little worried nevertheless, I was relieved to know that I got shortlisted for the technical discussion round.
The technical discussion round started and went along for close to 90 minutes. The discussion went so smoothly that it wasn’t like a question-answer session. I was given time to think. And the panel members were very cool, Very calmly, they used to explain the pitfalls in my approaches, making me think for a better one. The discussion went around many data structures problems, system design, Database, and OOPS. There were times, I was not able to get to the solution at first, but the panel members gave me hints and I could crack it. Not panicking and thinking with the cool mind helped me crack this. We even discussed the work that I was doing in the organization I was in, at that time. Overall the round went very well.
Phase 5: The final round and the offer
I was shortlisted for the final round! The Leadership Round. I was quite nervous about this round as I have heard that, one gets to interact with the founders! In my short experience of about under a year, I have never had any interaction with any founders hence I was nervous at the same time excited about the last round. I was completely ready to face this round.
I had a break for about 10 mins before the round. Thanks to my friend there, Kirti, who encouraged me to give my best as I had succeeded in the technical round and told her experience about the round in short.
With a bit of a mixed feeling of excitement/nervousness/anxiety finally, the last round discussion started! It was very cool, interacting with the founding team members directly, quite scary also:P.
What if I speak something wrong!!, was a thought constantly disrupting my mind. I spoke each word very carefully.
The discussion started with some very basic questions like, Why should we hire you, etc and in the middle even got technical! I had a very good discussion with the panel in this round.
Here is a small tit-bit from the final round, the panel member asked me to explain the difference between Compiler and Interpreter If I were to explain this to a 5-year-old kid. The panel member acted like 5-year-old kids.
It went very nice and funny! The 5-year-old kid was like, not understanding some of the computer concepts. It was fun explaining that.
It challenged me to make things simple. After this, I was told to wait for the result. And…
Hurrah! I GOT THE JOB! I was very happy:).
The whole discussion was awesome and I learned a lot of new things throughout the day in various interactions.
And Today I am Sahajeevi!
