My Interview Experiences as a Fresher
The article just revolves around all my interview experiences for research internships and on-campus placements
I would start with the most recent interview and proceed in reverse chronological order.
HSBC [On Campus- Full Time]
No. of Rounds: 1 Online Test+1 Technical Interview+1 HR Interview
-> Online Round
Behavioral: Situation specific test involving questions to rearrange the actions t
Job Simulation- Consisted of 3 Video Questions.
Coding- One coding question of very easy difficulty.
->Technical Interview
The interview lasted for around 1 hour 10 minutes.
The interviewer started asking questions from core computer science subjects.
The questions were:
- What is SSL? and explain its working and position among the layers?
- Explain encryption, Asymmetric encryption, and Digital Signatures.
- What is virtualization?
- Explain Docker and can we run containers without docker?
- Explain Cloud Orchestration and Kubernetes.
- Reader-Writer Problem from Operating Systems.
- Difference between Semaphore and Mutex.
- What is FSM(Finite State Machine)? Give one real-world example.
- What are sockets?
- Djikstra Algorithm.
- Code for inserting elements in the Linked List.
-> HR
- Tell me about yourself.
- Explain your best project.
- Tell me something that is not on your resume.
- What are good work ethics according to you?
- Opinion about negative feedback.
- The most difficult situation in your life.
Oracle[On Campus- Full Time]
No. of Rounds: 1 Online Test+ 3 Technical Interview Rounds
-> Online Test
The test was divided into sections and subsections. You can expect questions from Aptitude, General Mathematics, English Language, Computer Programming.
The Computer Programming section was the major one and it consists of questions from various topics like Data structure, DBMS, and more. Questions were asked from a variety of topics like AVL Tree, Threaded Binary Tree, etc.
Questions were average but the aptitude and mathematics parts were taking more time.
->Technical Interview Rounds
In the first round, the interviewer started with the introduction and then he asked a coding question that included general mathematics and asked me to optimize it. It was an easy one and they only wanted to check the coding skills. After that, he asked many questions about my resume and my internships. Later he asked some basic questions from DBMS and gave me an average-level SQL query to write, involving joins.
The second round included two coding questions. The first one was to reverse a string efficiently using recursion and the second one was a code related to the calendar problem. This was an easy round.
In the third round, an average coding question was asked related to the 2-D array. He also asked some questions from DBMS like different types of joins, how is SQL query executed, foreign keys, etc. Later he asked about my internship projects.
ETS Montreal, Quebec, Canada [Part Time, Research Internship]
The interview was directly taken by the professor himself. and the interview zoom call lasted for approximately 1 hour.
The interview began with a basic introduction and my previous work experiences.
Later on, I was asked to explain my previous internship project and the discussion was shifted to that only, for at least 30 minutes.
The project was related to the applied research problem of Blockchain Technology, entitled ‘Decentralised Cloud Federation using Blockchain’.
I was asked basic questions like how blockchain is suitable for the use case? How you made choice for the right blockchain platform? Why Permissioned Network? What was the ordering service used?
Are there any chances of unfairness still present in the newly proposed solution? After that, he made some valuable suggestions regarding my approach and showed some inconsistencies and performance drawbacks in the work which really fascinated me.
Later on, the discussion was shifted to Performace Improvements in Hyperledger Fabric and its current MVCC Architecture.
The second question was related to my Bachelor’s Thesis, and I explained my work. After that, we discussed a few more projects of mine, which shifted the discussion towards Ethereum, and he asked me about the new Ethereum 2.0.
I explained the new improvements and we discussed a little bit more about the new changes it will bring.
Later on, I was asked some questions related to BFT algorithms especially PBFT.
He also asked me about Federated Learning. As it's not my domain, I just presented a brief overview of what I knew.
Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany [Summer Research Internship]
At first, I was given a coding assignment, which I need to solve in 24 hours to proceed further.
The problem statement was simple and related to Public Key Infrastructure and gRPC programming.
After that I was invited for an interview call by one of the students pursuing a Ph.D. under the supervision of a Professor, I contacted.
The interview revolved around the assignment’s solution and the approach I used.
Here is the problem statement:
IIT Kharagpur [Summer Research Internship]
This interview was for an internship at the end of my sophomore year.
I was given two tasks:
- To establish a hyperledger fabric network such that different organizations are different physical machines.
- Writing a chaincode for hyperledger fabric auction application.
After that, I was invited for a phone interview. It involved basic questions and terminologies related to blockchain, like
- What is a permissioned blockchain network?
- What is different between Bitcoin and Hyperlegder Fabric?
- What is proof of work?
- What is cloud computing?
- Discussion on resume projects.
That’s all, I wanted to share :) Arigato!
Ps: The interviews mentioned above are the ones in which I got a positive response. Will share the negative response interviews in another article.
