Ittiam Systems Interview Experience | Set 2 (On-Campus)
Question Details
Round 1-Ittiam systems conducted an online coding contest on Hackerearth. Top 30 students were called for further interviews.Round 2-This was a technical round held over S...
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Round 1 Ittiam systems conducted an online coding contest on Hackerearth. Top 30 students were called for further interviews.
Round 2 This was a technical round held over Skype. They started off with some puzzles followed by some technical questions. Question 1 (Puzzle) - A and B are playing a game with a biased coin having probability of getting Heads(H) = 0.6 and that of Tail(T) = 0.4 Both player take alternate turns to toss the coin. For a player to win, he must get a Heads(H) in his toss and his opponent must get a Tail(T) in the next turn. If A tosses first, comment on whether the game is fair for both or not. Question 2(Puzzle)- There are 10 boxes. 9 out of these contain many balls of weight 10 grams each and one of the boxes contains many balls of 9 grams each. No of balls in each box is not the same, but there are many(lets say>100) balls in each box. You have a digital weighing machine and you have to use this machine to find the box which has balls of 9 grams each. Find a way in which you have to use the weighing machine minimum number of times. Question 3 - What data structure(in python) will you use to store 10 million integers. Query operations consist of finding the number of times a number appears in the given set. Options were - Set, List, Dictionary. He also asked worst case time complexity in all the cases. Question 4- You are given a character array consisting of lower and upper case English alphabets and some special characters. Hypothetically, ASCII values of these special characters overlap with that of the English characters. Find the character that is repeated max no of times in the array. Question 5- You have a 32 bit integer a. Given two integers n and m(m>=n), you have to find an integer formed by bits of a between n and m(both inclusive). The interviewer insisted on using bitwise functions and not to use any loops at all. In the end he asked whether i had any questions for him. I asked about work culture in the company, etc. The interviewer will try to confuse you. Try to be confident.
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a ittiam systems interview for a swe role during the phone screen round reported in 2017.
It covers the following topics: Arrays, Hash Table, Sql, Probability Stats, Bit Manipulation .
About Ittiam Systems Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Ittiam Systems. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Ittiam Systems are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Ittiam Systems interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Ittiam Systems reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Ittiam Systems Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Ittiam Systems reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.