Citicorp visited our campus for FTE hiring for Technical Programmer analyst in the month of Sept. The process had 3 rounds.
Round 1: Online Test
The test was conducted on the AMCAT platform. It had 4 sections, each section had its own time limit. You cannot skip a question, or go back to a question that you marked.
- Quantitative aptitude: 14 questions. The questions were relatively easy when compared to aptitude questions of other software companies.
- Logical Reasoning: 12 questions. Statements and Conclusions. Family Tree. Direction-based questions.
- Section 3: Technical MCQ: 25 questions. Have an understanding of Big O, Omega notations. Functions. OOPs, concepts.
- Section 4: Coding section: 2 questions.
- It’s a famous amazon interview question. I did it using DFS and it passed all test cases.
- https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/algorithms/124715/amazon-is-cheese-reachable-in-the-maze
- A tricky pattern printing question. Can be done using loops, but I did it using recursion as it was simpler. It passed all Test cases.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/program-to-print-the-trapezium-pattern/amp/
Note:
- Citi usually asks one graph question(DFS, BFS, or single-source shortest path) and one pattern printing question.
- Aptitude is given huge weightage while preparing the shortlist. So even if you have done 0-1 coding questions, you’ll get shortlisted if your score in aptitude was good.
Around 30 students were shortlisted from Btech for the Pune branch.
Round 2: Technical Interview
- Introductions and interests.
- Did he ask me to explain my ML project and some follow-up questions like why random forests? why not SVM? What libraries did I use? What is a pickle file? How did I deploy the code?
- I had mentioned CodeChef rating in my resume so he asked me why I do CP and what have I learned from it. He asked me about the language I used for CP (P.S. I use c++), and why. Why not python/C? difference between python/C/C++.
- What is object-oriented programming? How is it different from procedural or imperative programming? Pillar of OOPs with real-life analogies.
- He asked me if I’m aware of DBMS concepts and asked me about Normalisation. Why is it used, when is a table in second normal form? He asked me to write a query to get the 3rd lowest salary. I wrote this using 3 nested queries. He asked me to generalize it for N. I took some time and was able to recall the sub queries solution.
- He asked me a coding question.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sort-elements-by-frequency/amp/
- I knew the solution so solved it. He asked me to explain the TC and SC.
- He asked me for a puzzle.
- http://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/twentytwo.htm
Note:
- Do not write anything that you cannot defend in your resume. Write only the things you are 100% clear with.
Round 3: HR interview
- This interview went on for about 30 mins. The panel was very friendly. Some of the questions asked were:
- Strengths & weaknesses
- Why do you want to join Citi? What do you know about Citi?
- What are your career aspirations?
- Some discussion on my hobbies, family background.
- There were several companies before Citi where I could not clear the OT, and I got rejected from the final rounds of 2 companies. Just don’t lose hope. I know it’s easy to say, but keep going and remember that when it’s your day whatever can go right, will go right.