Eligibility criteria: 7 CGPA in UG.
There was a resume shortlisting round at the start.
Round 1(Online Aptitude and Coding Round): There were three parts in this round
| Section | No. of questions | Time |
| Quantitative aptitude | 15 | 20 |
| Technical Aptitude | 15 | 15 |
| Programming Test | 2 | 45 |
The technical aptitude had questions on DBMS, OOP, and DSA.
- There were MCQs and questions where we had to predict the output of the given program.
- Any time you save in the previous round could be used in the next round but one can’t go to a section after the time limit for that section or after moving to the next section i.e all the sections were sequential. However, you can go forward and backward in the same section.
Out of the 183 students who attempted this round, 16 were shortlisted for the interviews.
Round 2(Technical Interview): The interviewer asked me to introduce myself where I mentioned my previous internships. He asked me what I have learned from my previous internships.
- I mentioned that I have learned about what kind of decisions I should ask the client and what kind of decisions I should make on my own. For another internship, I have mentioned that I have learned to work on the company’s large codebase.
- He then asked me some technical questions on the technologies that I have worked on during my previous internships. Later he asked me how I would take input for a tree. What would be the arguments and how I would construct the tree from the given input.
- He asked me to code it and print the inorder traversal.
- He then asked me to write the code for the left view of a tree.
- All the coding was done on Hackerrank’s code pair.
- The round ended with him asking if I had any questions for him. I asked about the Operating system that Arcesium uses and about what technologies I will be working on if I get selected.
8 people were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 3(Technical Interview): This was purely an oral discussion about different concepts in OOP, DBMS, and DSA.
- Although a DSA question was asked, I just had to tell the algorithm. He didn’t ask me to code it. The interview was taken on BlueJeans.
- He asked me to introduce myself and then he introduced himself. He asked me my preferred language for OOP and asked questions in the same(My preferred language was Java).
Some of the questions he asked me on OOP were
- Can a constructor be private in Java?
- If a constructor is private how would you make an instance of that class?
- Can static methods use non-static variables?
- If you were a Java developer, would you allow the use of non-static variables in static methods, provided the objects of the class are already created?
- He then asked me some questions on DBMS. He asked what all databases I have used until now. I told him that I have used MySQL primarily and have also used some other databases like MongoDB and SQLite.
Some questions he asked me on DBMS were
- Do you know the difference between SQL and NoSQL databases? When will you use each of these?
- What is the use of column orientated databases
- Tell me about the ACID principles
- How do you ensure consistency?
- He gave an example transaction and we had some discussion about its consistency.
- How can you implement locks in MySQL.?
- He then asked me a DSA question
- Tell me the algorithm for replacing the value in each node with the sum of values of all nodes greater than the current node in a BST.
- He asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked the answer to a question he asked me in the interview and asked about what technologies he works on.
- I answered all the questions correctly.
6 people were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 4(Technical Interview): This was very similar to round 3 in its structure. No question had to be coded completely.
- The interviewer asked me for my introduction. He asked me to explain my project idea and how I implemented it. Immediately he went into the technical questions.
- Questions were on OOP, DBMS, DSA mainly. He also asked for a puzzle at the end.
Some questions he asked me on OOP:
- What are the key features of OOP?
- Tell me about the types of inheritance in OOP
- What are aggregation and composition in OOP
- Give real-world examples for aggregation and composition.
Some questions he asked me on DBMS:
- What databases have you used in your projects?
- Write the query to select employee name and manager Id from this table. (Manager is also an employee)
- (Emp_id,name,manager_id)
- What are normal forms in databases? How many normal forms are there?
- What is BCNF
- Could you give me an example of BCNF?
- I gave him an example with A, B, C, D, E. He asked me for a real-world example. I told him that the same example I gave could be seen in the real world and converted into an ERP example.
- He then asked me a DSA question.
- He asked me to find the row which has the maximum number of 1s in a 2D binary matrix that has sorted rows.
- I gave him a solution in O(M*N). Optimizing it step by step, I came up with an O(N+M) solution.
- I answered all the questions correctly.
- He then asked me for a puzzle. Before asking it he asked me if I knew the 25 horses puzzle. I told him that I didn’t know that question and he explained it clearly. I answered correctly for the first two horses but missed one horse in the race to find the third-fastest horse. I tried for some time but was not able to give the exact answer. He told that he was running out of time and that I have done it better than 99% of the people who solve this question the first time.
3 people have been given the final offer out of which I am one.