Dell R&D Interview Experience for SDE

Round 1: Online Assessment

The Online assessment was conducted via HirePro. It was a 125-minute examination divided into 3 sections. The intersectional switch was not allowed. Intersectional switching was permitted.

Section 1: Aptitude

• There was a medium difficulty level of 15 questions to be solved in 20 minutes. Time constraint was the major factor here. The questions were numerically based and not related to verbal/comprehension concepts.

Section 2: Technical 

• There were 40 questions in this section to be solved in 55 minutes. The questions were MCQ based on OS, DBMS, computer networks, and C programming. This section consisted of concept-related questions and no numerical. The C questions were output-based questions, to predict the output given a code snippet. This was of easy to medium difficulty. 

Section 3: Coding

Three coding questions are given and the time was 50 minutes. The questions were easy. 

1. Find the sum of the product of the middle row and column in an odd square matrix. It was a slight modification of the below problem.
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/product-of-middle-row-and-column-in-an-odd-square-matrix/
3. The second was a modified version of finding lucky numbers in a matrix. https://leetcode.com/problems/lucky-numbers-in-a-matrix/

Only two questions were required to be solved. 

Round 2: Technical Interview

There were two people and they asked initially for an introduction. They started off by asking about some technologies which were part of the job requirement. They asked me some questions on AWS and cloud in general. They also asked me some UNIX script commands and ML(as I had mentioned in my resume). They were fairly simple questions like:

• How to remove all the files?
• How to change the contents of a directory with a command?
• How to create a new directory?
• How to perform JSON parsing?
• What are supervised and unsupervised learning?
• State the difference between performance metrics: MAPE, RMSE, MSE, etc.
• Why do we use these performance metrics and their significance in ML?
• What are precision and recall? Explain not in terms of formulas but in terms of usage and significance.
• Then they gave some DBMS query questions. Simple ones based on JOIN operation. The whole round lasted for about 40 minutes.
• For some other students, there were simple coding questions of sorting asked and no OS, DBMS, or CN questions.

Round 3: Technical+ Managerial

The new panel also had two senior-level employees. It was more technical rather than managerial. 

• There were deep questions related to my projects. I had worked extensively on IoT. So it was based on IoT protocols, cloud, and security of the system I designed. My primary choice of programming in C++. So a few simple questions about C++ like access modifiers, class, OOP concepts, the difference between C and C++ were asked to explain. They did ask questions like:
• We work with Scala, Big Data, and some other technologies, which you do not have prior experience with, how do you think you could add to our company?
• If joined, which tech would you be interested to work in?

This round lasted for around 30 minutes. 

Round 4: HR 

It was just 5 minutes round asking about relocation to Banglore.

Tips: Be ready with whatever is there on your resume. Do not forget to revise your own project reports/documentation.