Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Adobe MTS, CS1, and ML-engineer loops in India — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Round 1 — DSA
A disjoint-set/union-find problem with multiple follow-up extensions on the same base structure.
Round 2 — C++ / CS Fundamentals
Deep dives on multithreading, B+ trees, bipartite graphs, virtual destructors, and the diamond inheritance problem.
Round 3 — DSA + LLD
A two-pointer/connected-components coding warm-up, followed by 'build a garbage collector in C++'.
Round 4 — Advanced C++
Smart pointers and backtracking.
Round 5 — Hiring Manager
A behavioral round.
Round 6 — Director
Conversational round, described by the candidate as the easiest of the whole loop.
Key takeaway: For C++-track roles, expect memory-management depth (smart pointers, virtual destructors, garbage collection) tested across multiple rounds, not just one.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Round 1 — DSA
An anagram-counting problem (counting valid rearrangements of a sentence's letters under certain constraints); cleared quickly.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — DSA
A message-propagation-in-hierarchy problem, asked as both a parallel and a sequential relay variant.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — DSA
A sliding-window problem counting distinct active users within a trailing 5-minute window.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Round 1 — System Design
An end-to-end pipeline to predict document aspect ratio from combined image and text input.
🔒 3 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit