Caterpillar Interview Experience for Associate Engineer (Off-Campus) 2023

Round 1: Aptitude and technical round

Aptitude had both quantitative and technical aptitude questions. quantitative aptitude consists of basic questions based on time and distance, train, start and end points distance calculation, etc. Technical aptitude had questions from core-related concepts like control systems engineering, digital systems design, microprocessor and microcontrollers, linear integrated circuits, and a few code snippets. The test was conducted in the SHL platform please make sure to choose the right answer for a question before moving to the next question. Once selected and done it can never be changed.

Since I applied for the core domain I didn’t have many questions based on programming and the test was fully based on testing our core knowledge and a little bit of programming knowledge.

Successfully I was shortlisted for the second round and I was 1 in 200.

Round 2: Group Discussion(GD)

The Group Discussion round mainly focussed on reducing the count of candidates from 200 to very few. The total students were divided into teams and each team had a maximum of 7 students. We were given the topic of ‘Which one is effective?’ online education vs. offline education and the period for GD is 10 mins and we all stated equal points related to the topic.

• When the GD result was declared I was happy to hear my name and happy to hear that I was qualified for the technical interview round.
• While preparing for GD mainly focus on topics related to current affairs, train yourself to speak fluent in english and make sure that you give chances to your colleagues to speak.

Round 3: Technical Interview

There were a total of 9 panel in 9 rooms. Each panel focussed on different areas like programming concepts, machine learning, projects that have been done, core concepts related to your stream and anoll.

Fortunately I was sent to a panel who mainly focussed on programming and data structures. After seeing my resume the panel asked me to scale yourself in programming and asked me are you a beginner or advanced level programmer. In return I said I am a full time advanced programmer.

1. He asked me about inheritance and types of inheritance. He asked me to write a code in multiple inheritance by taking shape as a base class and rectangle, polygon and circle as its derived class.
2. He then asked me about virtual pointers and its uses. I demonstrated and explained him with a run time polymorphism code.
3. Atlast he asked me to consider a sorted array of any size and fetch a particular value from that array or search any value from that array efficiently. I did solved it with binary search and explained its working. He was very satisfied with my performance and asked me some theoretical concepts related to STL(Standard Template Library).
4. What is a vector what are its uses and differentiate between vector and array.
5. What is a map or unordered_map and explain its working.
6. What is the unique feature of set when compared to other STL.

After answering to all the questions he said you are strong in the field of programming and advised me to improve your communication skills a little bit so that you won’t get stammered.

After waiting for many hours to hear the result and atlast I got selected for internship plus full time employment in caterpillar.

So while preparing to interviews mainly focus on the basic concepts of programming irrespective of any language and focus mainly on concepts related to OOPS, DSA and STL in C++.