Cognizant Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus) 2022

I am a student of B.Tech. (Computer Science )(2022) at JUET, Guna. Cognizant came to our campus for SDE following profiles (GenC-next ,GenC , GenC -elevate) roles (internships + full time (On successful completion)).

Round 1 (Online exam): Online exam on Superset. Multiple languages to choose from (python ,C++,C). Implementation based questions of coding (like  Sorting ,maximum ). For exercise do Codeforces 800 rating questions .

Round 2 (Technical interview): Most of them were selected including me .I was lucky that my interviewer was on time. Most of my friends had to sit for like one or two hours or were rescheduled as they were late and that’s how it all started between us:

Me:Good morning, Sir.

Interviewer: Good morning,  let’s start by introducing yourself.

Me: Told him my  Name, place, CGPA, technical skills ,projects ,present working project ,achievements .

Interviewer: Very good ,so you do Competative prgramming (hmmm).

Me: Yes Sir .

Interviewer: So in which language do you code ?

Me: Python majorly but in C++ only when there is recursion and there is always a StackOverflow in python as every call of python in recursion is very big .

Interviewer: Nice .So lets start with Python .

Me: Sure Sir .

Interviewer: Do you know about List ?

Me: Yes Sir, told him about what is a list, immutable or not, what is the use, how I use it, different functions which can be used with it, memory allocations in the list ( ex: in case of similar elements in the list, the same memory address is used )

Interviewer: What is the difference between List and Tuple .

Me: Explained him all .

Interviewer: Ok ,good .What is set and dictionary?

Me: Explained .

Interviewer: How will you exchange keys and values in the dictionary?

Me: Though for one minute, told him a long method using two lists, one for keys and values and then swapping the values in the dictionary. (But he wanted some smaller method )(I really had no idea that he might ask me this). Told him I can think of this only right now .

Interviewer: Ok , no problem .So you know HTML and JavaScript ?

Me: Yes sir .

Interviewer: Tell me how do you design a webpage for filling up the form .

Me: Ok sir .Just like google-form? (He said yes ) .Then I explained to him about using body tags, paragraph tags, and then suddenly he said ok just tell me about how will you make a table. I said explained to him all table tags and padding and all .

Interviewer: Ok, so you also know SQL ?

Me: Yes !

Interviewer: Tell me difference between Union and Union all ?

Me: Told him but remembered after one minute or so

Interviewer:  Tell me what is the different types of keys?

Me: told him and then suddenly in as I was explaining to him the unique key, he said ok so what is the difference between unique and primary key.I explained him .

Interviewer: Ok, so tell me the difference between all cross join ,full join .

Me: Told .

Interviewer: So you have used a database in your project (hmm)

Me: Yes .

Interviewer: How will you connect your database with your application?

Me: I was not able to remember and said so!!!

Interviewer: Asked me about  present project ?

Me: I was very happy to tell him as this was a research-based project and explained the need, technicalities, and usefulness .

Interviewer: Ok good .Ok xxx, It was very nice to talk to you. Do you wanna ask something ?

Me: I asked him a few and then what all things can I improve in ?

Interviewer: Told me about being better with SQL ( maybe because of database question )

Afterward I got selected in that but for one profile down. Most of my other friends had a very chill talk with their interviews (not my case ) .