Motive Software Engineer(Internship) interview questions

The interview process for the Software Engineer Internship was focused on evaluating problem-solving and algorithmic thinking. It was a single technical round that began with a short introduction followed by a deep dive into a data structures and algorithms question. The interviewer was polite and allowed me to ask clarifying questions before starting. The main question was to implement a basic version of the Minesweeper board game. Given a 2D grid with some cells marked as mines, I had to return a board where each cell not containing a mine displayed the count of adjacent mines. The problem tested my understanding of matrix traversal, edge condition handling, and clean code structure. I used a nested loop along with a helper function to check adjacent cells and update the board accordingly. The interviewer encouraged me to think aloud, explain my approach, and discuss possible optimizations. I initially missed an edge case, but after discussion and correction, I arrived at a working solution. They appreciated the clarity in logic and the way I debugged the issue. Overall, the interview was a solid test of algorithmic skills and logical thinking. It was a good learning experience that reinforced the importance of handling edge cases and writing clean, maintainable code under pressure.

I applied for the software engineer intern position. The first stage was online coding evaluation with general coding questions on CodeSignal. I cleared that and after a week recieved a call from HR. That call was basically the behavioral interview round and then a technical interview was scheduled with a software engineer from India. I failed to see that it may have been a very important interview for me but it was like the 5th or 6th interview he was conducing that day so I could not match his energy.