Dell Technologies Interview Experience for SDE-1

Dell Technologies visited our campus in the second week of August for the role of SDE – 1(Solutions Role) – Intern + FTE 2022. They were offering a 6-month internship, and after that, it will be converted into full-time.  

Students having a CGPA of 7.5 and above and with no active backlogs were eligible. Only CS/IT students were allowed. Around 600 students from our college sat for the first round.

ROUND 1(Resume Shortlisting): Initially, they asked us to submit our latest resumes. 

• After 4-5 days, they shortlisted around 90 students for the online test. 
• In resume shortlisting, CGPA was not the only criteria as some students having 8.5 CGPA weren’t shortlisted, while some with even around 7.8 CGPA sat for the online test. 
• It was mostly based on your projects and skills in the resume.

ROUND 2(Online Test – 60 minutes): The online test was conducted on HirePro platform. 

• It was an MCQ-based test, consisting of 50 questions. Ouf of those 50, 10 questions were from Aptitude, while others were purely based on Core CS subjects like DBMS, OS, Networking, OOPS, C++, Java, SQL, and Data Structures. 
• I found the online test quite lengthy, as mostly the questions were conceptual and were taking a lot of time to solve. I confidently answered about 38-40 questions and was selected for interviews.
• Around 12 students got selected for the next round.

ROUND 3(Technical Interview 1 – 45 minutes): Technical interviews were conducted the next day, in Microsoft Teams. 

• My interviewer was very polite. He asked me to introduce myself and then he introduced himself.  
• He asked me about my projects. I explained two of my projects to him. One was related to customizing Apache Web Server, and the other was based on LSB Technique of Image Steganography. 
• There were some cross-questions. He wanted to know the motivation behind the topic, as well as the tech stack I used to implement the projects. 
• After that, he asked me a lot of questions surrounding OOPS concepts, DBMS, OS, and Networking. Some of them were:
• Explain the layers of the OSI Model.
• Abstraction vs Data Hiding
• CPU Scheduling techniques and some conceptual questions regarding that. After that, he asked me to implement encapsulation.
• After this, they asked me about my preferred programming language. I said C++, so there were a lot of questions regarding that, like how doubly linked list is implemented in C++, Interfaces, Friend functions, and some more. 

After core CS questions, he asked me two coding questions. They were:

• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/merging-intervals/ (He first asked the approach, and then asked me to write just the function.
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/delete-nth-node-from-the-end-of-the-given-linked-list/ (He just wanted the approach for this question) 

After that, he asked me about some DevOps tools like Git, Maven, Docker (mentioned in my resume), and the interview ended.

Around 5 students were selected for the next round.

ROUND 4(Managerial + HR – 30 minutes): This interview was kind-a basic interview based on my resume. 

• The interviewer asked me about my internships, and mostly the skill-set. He asked me about Microsoft Azure and its services. Since I also participated in some hackathons. he asked me about those project ideas and their implementations. 
• After that, the interviewer started asking some behavioral questions like teamwork, team management, conflicts and so on. The interview ended with me asking him a question regarding the internship period and the technologies that we will be working on if selected.

Finally, 3 students were given Intern + FTE offer, and luckily, I was one of them. 

Some Important Tips:

1. In Technical interviews, it’s not like that the interviewer expects you to answer all the questions. I answered around 80% of the questions. But it’s important to be confident while answering the questions you know.  
2. In live coding during interviews, always first explain your approach to the interviewer, and then proceed further. If your code doesn’t work, don’t panic. Re-read your code and try to find the issue. But remember, the interviewers are always more focused on your approach, rather than output.
3. Always know each and every word written in your resume. Don’t write anything that you aren’t confident about.  

The placement season is hectic, but always believe in yourself and keep on revising basics.  

All the very best.