The company came to our campus in mid-August for the role of BA3. One of the most confusing things to clear here is BA3 role **DOES NOT MEAN** “Business Analyst” instead it is just a grade level in Barclays and the role is of developer only. Moving on to the process there were basically 2 rounds:
- MCQs + Coding round
- Interview (Tech + HR)
Round 1: MCQs + Coding round
The test was conducted on HackerEarth. This round is a bit tricky, both – in terms of questions as well as time management. There will be 30 MCQs in total and 2 coding questions. The total round was 208 marks of which MCQs had 138 marks and coding had 70 marks and the total time gave was 1.5 hours. Yes you read it right MCQs had more weightage and that is because they are competitive and not that easy. MCQs range from a variety of topics like:
- These MCQs were +4 or +6 with just one question for me having -1 otherwise there is no negative marking. Having intermediate coding knowledge with clear fundamentals is enough to crack enough MCQs.
- For the coding round, the 2 questions were 20 marks and 50 marks. To be honest both the questions appeared tricky to me at first but only when I started coding and went through it line by line I got the code working. So, please don’t give up on the questions based on first look, they are easy, you just need to understand the constraints. I was able to solve the 20 marks question fully and in the 50 marks question, I was able to solve 10/15 test cases.
- In the 20 marks question, I was asked to print the minimum sum of the array using a function as per the given conditions. The condition was to take the next largest or previous largest so here I had to use math. floor and math. ceil inside the function and then I had to replace the numbers in the array any number of times as per this function and get the minimum sum possible.
- The 50 marks question was based on some chemist which has to minimize the cost of the chemical reaction. I didn’t have much practice of DP and also not much time was left so I tried brute force (with some optimizations for edge cases) and it worked for 10 test cases and others giving TLE.
The results came on the next day of the test and 21 people were selected for the next round.
PS: I have observed that it was either easy MCQs with difficult coding questions or vice versa so spend your time properly.
Round 2: Interview (Tech + HR)
- To be very honest I got one of the most enthusiastic interviewers. The interview didn’t start with any “Tell me about yourself” question but it instead started with “Pick one of your projects and explain it” and this was the best moment as now it was in my hand how to direct the interview. I was very well prepared with my projects and everything that was on my resume. I explained my project which was a crowdsourced emergency resource directory website.
- She asked me questions about how would you manage large data (Note: I knew this question was coming because I had researched about the interviewer well in advance and she was working on the Teradata tool) so I answered with data warehousing and its uses to which she was happy.
- Then she asked me “What are the security measures you have taken to protect your website” to which I answered with some SQL injection preventions and javascript injection prevention techniques which we incorporated in the website.
- She then asked me about my second project and what were the contributions I have made, why was this project made and how did this help. I explained to her in and out about the project which all the technical aspects.
PRO TIP: As I saw she was interested in my projects I asked her whether I can screen share and show the project-related diagrams which I had already made and kept (Like process flow and ER Diagrams). Trust me this is a banger!
- Then she moved on to my internships and asked me what I learned from the internships and how did I make an impact on the organization. I explained about technologies I worked on and what I and the organizations gained from the same. As I had worked on docker in my internships she asked me some basic questions about DevOps like, What is DevOps? Why are companies using this? Is it effective?
- The interview ended with some HR questions on the company:
- What do you know about Barclays?
- Why Barclays and not other service-based companies?
- The Interview went very well and it was one of the best interviews I gave!
The interview was on Monday and the results came on Tuesday night. There were only 3 students selected and I was not one of them It was mentioned as the 1st list of students but we came to know that it is the final list
Days passed and I lost hope BUT SUDDENLY on Friday morning, the 2nd list came with 4 more students and I was one of them
A total of 7 students were selected from our college.
WHAT SHOULD YOU KNOW?
- Be thorough with what you have mentioned in your resume
- knowledge of OOPs
- Basic knowledge about trending technologies like MongoDB
- RISES values (HR questions should be answered based on this) (https://home.barclays/who-we-are/our-strategy/purpose-and-values/)
- Research about the interviewer on platforms like LinkedIn