DSA for TCS, Infosys & Wipro, What Mass Recruiters Test

If your near-term target is TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, or Accenture, grinding LeetCode-hard dynamic programming is mostly wasted effort. Mass recruiters hire at huge scale, so their process optimises for fundamentals, aptitude, and basic coding under time pressure, not exotic algorithms. Knowing this saves you weeks.

The mass-recruiter bar is "can you write correct, simple code and pass the aptitude + verbal sections," not "can you solve a hard graph problem." Over-indexing on hard DSA here is a classic misallocation.

What the rounds look like

• Aptitude: quantitative, logical reasoning, verbal. Often the biggest filter. Practise this as seriously as coding.

• Coding: 1–2 problems on arrays, strings, basic math, patterns, loops, and simple logic. Occasionally a basic data structure. Rarely hard.

• Pseudocode / MCQ (TCS NQT style): reading and reasoning about code, output prediction, basic complexity.

• Verbal / email writing: yes, really. Don't skip it.

The DSA you actually need

PriorityTopics

CoreArrays, strings, basic math, patterns/loops, simple recursion, sorting/searching
HelpfulHash maps, basic linked lists, stacks/queues
Skip (for now)Hard DP, advanced graphs, segment trees, tricky greedy

Where to spend your time

In rough order of prep time: aptitude first, then basic coding, then pseudocode/MCQ and verbal rounds. If you're also targeting product companies later, build the deeper DSA after you've cleared the mass-recruiter basics; the foundation transfers, the over-preparation doesn't transfer backwards.

For the deeper product-vs-service split, read service vs product company DSA prep. When you're ready to specialise by role, DSA Tracker reorders the curated sheet so you drill the right patterns first, and the most important DSA topics post covers the shared foundation every track needs.

The 20 problems that cover mass-recruiter coding rounds

The coding questions at TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and Accenture come from a small pool of shapes, and each shape has a canonical problem in the tracker. Arrays: Reverse the Array, Maximum and Minimum Element in an Array, Rotate Array, Majority Element, Two Sum. Strings: Valid Palindrome, Reverse Words in a String, Valid Anagram, Longest Common Prefix, Roman to Integer. Math and patterns: Pascal's Triangle, Climbing Stairs. Searching and sorting: Binary Search, Sort Colors, Merge Sorted Arrays. Basic structures, for the occasional second question: Valid Parentheses, Reverse Linked List, Middle of Linked List. Solve each one twice, the second time under a timer, and write the time complexity next to your answer, because the MCQ section asks for exactly that. If you can do these twenty without notes, the coding section is not the round that will eliminate you.

Related on DSA Tracker

• Arrays topic hub
• Strings topic hub
• Sorting topic hub
• Service vs product company prep
• Big-O explained

Further reading: Binary search on Wikipedia.