Cadence Design Systems visited our campus for an internship + PPO offer.
- They did not have any aptitude or coding round, they screened our resumes and shortlisted 35 students for interviews.
- I had 3 rounds of Interviews two of them were Technical and one Technical + HR.
- All rounds were Virtual through Zoom Meetings
First Round: First round went for around 25-30 Minutes. They asked me to introduce myself then which technologies I am good at. Then I was asked about some OOP concepts and design patterns. In the end interviewer gave me a situation and asked what I would have done (This was related to automation as the role they offering was QA Engineer).
Out of 35, 15 were selected for the next round.
Second Round: Second round went for about 60 minutes. It was all technical questions and two puzzles at the end. I was asked about OS, semaphores, context switch, multithreading. They also asked me questions about C, C++ like calloc, malloc uses, difference, syntax, comparison with new keyword in C++. Some questions about storage classes in C and their uses. What is volatile keyword.
Then the interviewer asked me to open Notepad and share my screen. She asked me to write a pseudo code for subtraction of two numbers represented by linked lists and return output as a new linked list.
The interviewer was very friendly and was also helping me to think about corner cases. I was able to solve the problem, and the interviewer was satisfied with my approach.
In the end interviewer asked me two puzzles.
- Three ants and Triangle – There are 3 ants sitting on three corners of a triangle. All ants randomly pick a direction and start moving along edge of the triangle. What is the probability that any two ants collide?
- Burning ropes – How to measure 45 minutes using two ropes where each burns in 1 hour. (Please refer to this link for details)
The interview process was different for all candidates, some had only 2 rounds and some had 3 rounds.
2 students were selected after second round and 3 students were asked for another round of interview.
Third Round: The third round went for about 1 hour and 45 minutes for each candidate!
- They had a panel of 5 interviewers and they asked me questions on DS, OOP, C, C++, OS, Linux and DBMS.
- I was asked all about static keywords in C and C++. Runtime Polymorphism and its implementation using vptr and vtable.
- Next I had to write a code for finding number of set bits in a given integer.
- Then I was asked about critical section problem in OS and what is a deadlock. After this, they asked for some basic commands in Linux.
- Then some questions of DBMS like ACID properties and transactions and one question to write a SQL query to find a student with the second highest marks from the table. (Similar question can be found here).
- All this technical discussion went for around 75 minutes and after that one of the interviewer started asking HR questions.
- HR questions were also interesting. They were looking for abilities like critical thinking, logical reasoning and communication skills.
- I was asked some interesting questions like what would you do if you were on Titanic at the time of the accident? They were looking for details in answer. Another question was – you are given a brick, tell all possible uses that you can imagine, like – construction, as a weight.
At the end of each round they also asked if I had any question for them. One more student was selected after this round and thus they selected 3 students.
Conclusion: The interviewers were investing a lot of time in the process. Clearly, they hired students with a well all round personality and critical thinking ability. Be confident and logical while answering questions. Also, don’t try to answer when you are not sure about the concept. Also rather than wasting interviewers time on some topic that you don’t know, you can always tell the interviewer that you are not comfortable in that area.
Hope this experience helps you and all the best!