Cloudera visited our college in September 2022 for the SDE profile. It was an offer for a full-time employee and a 6-month mandatory internship It consisted of 4 rounds.
Round 1: This was an online coding test conducted on the Hackerrank platform. There were 4 coding questions. The first question was a normal logic-based Array problem, the second was a DP(Dynamic Programming) problem, and the third question was a linked list problem. Overall the questions were medium to hard level, and almost all programming languages were allowed to use.
Round 2: This was the first technical interview and was conducted on a google meet. The interview started on time and it began with a ‘Tell me about yourself?’. Then the interviewer asked questions from OOPS, DBMS, and OS. Then they shared a link for coding ide. They asked a question to code. The question was “Print all palindromic substrings in a given string”. I solved it using backtracking. She also gave a question to code from the ‘sliding window’ concept. After the coding, the questions from Computer basics continued. Some of the questions were:
- OS: Process v/s Thread, Define Deadlock, Define Starvation, Different Scheduling algorithms, What is a mutex, semaphore, etc.
- DBMS: Types of database languages (DDL, DML, DCL, TCL), Difference between SQL & MongoDB, Normalization and different normalization forms, What is Foreign Key?, Different types of Joins in SQL,
- OOPS: Polymorphism v/s Abstraction, Inheritance and its types, Error v/s Exception, Operator Overloading, Function Overloading, etc.
In the end, they asked if I had any questions for them and said that HR will get in touch with further communication. Overall it was a very good experience at this point as the interviewer was very patient and polite. It was a 45min interview and within an hour, I received a link for my next interview.
Round 3: This was the second technical interview and was also conducted on a google meet. This also began with a ‘Tell me about yourself?’. Since, I had experience in Web Development, the interviewer after my introduction went straight into questions from web and web applications. We had a detailed discussion on my projects and past internships. Then, he asked me a question which was “How would plan to protect your web application from a hacker who has admin credentials for your application and accesses the application from an unknown IP address?”. After this, he asked a few basic questions from Computer Networks like the 7 layers OSI model, different types of transport protocol, 2-way handshaking v/s 3-way handshaking, etc. Next, he dived into core Computer Science subjects like OS, DBMS, and OOPs. Some of the questions were:
- OS: Detail explanation of all the Scheduling algorithms, Preemptive v/s Non-preemptive scheduling, When deadlock happens? What is Thrashing, Paging, Virtual Memory, etc.
- DBMS: Use cases of SQL and MongoDB, Different types of Joins in SQL, How to establish relations in MongoDB, 2 SQL queries were asked(Find the 3rd highest salary of an employee from the employee table).
- OOPS: Interface v/s Class in Java, Constructor, and types of Constructors, Inheritance and its types, runtime v/s compile time polymorphisms, how can we achieve abstraction? etc.
Apart from this the interviewer also asked me two puzzles, out of which I remember only one which is:
- There are two rooms. One room has 3 bulbs, and another room has 3 switches. Each switch corresponds to each bulb, but you don’t know which switch belongs to which bulb and you can’t see from one to another. You are currently present in the room with 3 switches and are allowed to go to the other room only once. How will you find which switch belongs to which bulb?
This round continued for a bit more than an hour. After an hour and a half, I received a mail saying I had qualified for this round and had another interview.
Round 4: This was the last and final round. It was an HM(Hiring Manager) Round. It started with a very basic and short introduction of mine. He asked about my school days and how I grew interested in Computer Science. Which was the most difficult subject for me during my B. Tech and how I handled it. We had a detailed conversation about how I grew interested in Computer and Web Applications over the last 3 years in my B.Tech course. Next, he asked me if I could design a Flight Reservation System by applying the oops concept and how would I implement different oops concepts. At last, he asked what I knew about the company. There was a detailed discussion on this. This was more of a behavioral round and the interviewer was testing me on how I would react in different complicated situations.
Suggestions:
- Be honest, don’t try to make things up, they will catch!
- They don’t expect us to answer every question perfectly, but they test our thinking ability, our approach to different questions, and how we act in difficult situations
- Try going through all the basic concepts and staying calm during the interviews.
All The Best!