EPAM Systems visited my campus during my 3rd year of B.Tech for an internship role. They are hiring for two roles, one is for Java developer and the other one is for Test Automation Engineer. It was in April 2023 and the basic eligibility criteria is 60% throughout means 60% above is required in 10th, 12th, and Graduation till now. Our college management shortlisted only the top 20 students from all students based on our performance in a DSA training program which is organized by our college from September 2022 to January 2023.
First Round:
After applying all the shortlisted students got an email for the first round. It was an online assessment round that consisted of questions from JAVA, Spring, SpringBoot, JSPs, and Servlets along with the code snippets of where we had to guess the outputs. There were around 45 that needed to be solved in 1 hour and the cutoff for this round was to get at least 70% of the score. The platform they used is their Epam platform only which also has camera proctoring throughout the assessment.
Second Round:
Those who got above 70% of the score received the second round of assessment links. This round consists of 5 tasks that need to be completed using Java only. They have given us the problem statements along with the test cases which need to be passed completely. After writing the codes, we need to push the code on GitLab and submit it to them within two days. I completed 4/5 tasks and submitted them.
After carefully reviewing our assessments for nearly 10 days, they shortlisted 12 students for the interviews by dividing them into two batches, the first batch of students had the interview on the very next day and the other batch after 10 days. I belong to the second batch and have enough time to be prepared. Our college sent the syllabus to be prepared to attend the interviews.
Epam Syllabus
Third Round:
I even remember the date of the interview, it was on 27th April 2023. It is a one-on-one face-to-face interview. Firstly, the interviewer joined late for 10 mins and initially, he didn’t have a stable connection, but somehow everything sorted well. So, he started the interview by introducing himself and later asked for my self-introduction. I gave a rapid self-intro of mine by mentioning everything from the resume. Now, he asked me to rate myself in Java out of 10. I told him around 7-8. He started asking about the history of Java along with all the OOP concepts from Java. Some questions I remembered :
- Why multiple inheritance is not possible in Java?
- Why Character is 2 bytes in Java whereas it is 1 byte in C/C++?
- What do you know about Dynamic Method Dispatch in Java?
- How can you handle your custom exception?
- What are the ways to achieve multi-threading in Java?
- Difference between HashMap and TreeMap? etc.
These were related to Java and then he asked whether I knew Spring/Springboot, then I told him that I’d completed a project using JSPs and Servlets in Java. So, he asked me some questions on Servlets, JSPs, how to integrate them etc.., I explained him briefly and he was pretty satisfied enough.
Now, he asked me to open the code editor which is on that platform only, and then he sent a code snippet that consists of a Student class along with its properties, by using it I need to sort the students based on the student mobile numbers. I solved this using Comparator with a custom class, he then asked me how to optimize it then I told him we could use Stream APIs, and then he asked me to convert that code into Java 8 Stream APIs. As I’ve never used Java8 syntax before, I simply told him that I couldn’t write the code.
Now, we moved to the SQL and Databases part, he asked me all the basic questions related to Databases, and DBMS concepts like keys, joins, and ACID properties etc., later he gave me a table and asked me to write a query, i tried but couldn’t complete it properly and the interviewer is pretty satisfied. Finally, the interview was completed which lasted for 1:45 hours.
But, after some days, Epam Systems decided that they were not going to hire any interns/freshers in the year 2023. They still didn’t release our results of the interviews, pretty disappointed but grateful for the opportunity to attend the interviews and get some insights about their hiring process.