F5 Interview Experience for Software Engineer-1 | On-Campus 2022

F5 Networks Innovation visited my college Thapar University for the recruitment of a Full-time Software Engineer-1 role in the month of January 2022. 

Eligibility Criteria : 

• Streams: CSE, ENC, ECE, EE, and EIC
• Min CGPA: 7

There are 5 rounds:

Round 1: Online Coding Round

• Total Duration: 1.5 hours
• Total Questions: 2 coding questions + 15 MCQs (OS, CN, OOPs, Aptitude and Reasoning)

I did solve all the questions including the MCQs, coding question difficulty level is moderate. (Leetcode: medium)

Round 2: Group Activity / Design Thinking Round

Total Duration: 1.5 to 2 hours

All the shortlisted students will be divided into groups of 4-5 students. Each group will be given some problem statements onto which I detailed solution will be expected. All we need to do in this round is to have a good grasp of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) model and good knowledge of System Design Concepts.

For example, My team worked on the topic ‘Advance Traffic Challan System’, we followed all the steps involved in the SDLC model and curated the solution. All the panel members were satisfied with our solution.

Round 3: Technical Round (F2F virtual interview)

Total Duration: 1.5 to 2 hours

2 interviewers were present in this round. The interview started with a brief introduction about myself and the projects I’ve had put on my resume. Then they asked me in which programming language do I code, I said C++. After that, multiple questions were asked to check the in-depth knowledge of C++ language, Operating systems, and Computer Networks :

1. What do you mean by Polymorphism?
2. What is new and delete keyword.
3. Types of constructors, and the order of allocation and deallocation.
4. What are inheritance and its types?
5. Difference between heap memory and stack memory.
6. Questions related to pointers, and their applications.
7. Real-life implementations of various Data Structures.
8. What is the fork() command in OS?
9. Explain Deadlock.
10. What do you understand by semaphores and mutex?
11. Explain the difference between OSI and TCP/IP models.
12. How the Internet works, and what is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

After that, they asked me to share my screen and gave 3 coding questions to code one after the other. The difficulty level of the questions was of Leetcode medium.

• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/intersection-point-in-y-shapped-linked-lists/1
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-binary-tree-vertical-order/
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reverse-words-in-a-given-string/

Proper discussion on each and every question will be done, and the interviewers will also ask you to make some tweaks in your code to display the results in a way they want. I did solve all the 3 questions in some 20-25 minutes explaining my naive to optimized approach for each of the questions.

Tip: Think out loud!

Round 4: Managerial Round (F2F virtual interview)

Total Duration: 45 – 60 minutes

The interviewer asked me to briefly introduce myself and later gave his introduction in a greater depth along with his profile in the company and his overall experience.

Then we quickly moved on to the projects mentioned in my resume, since I’ve made 3 projects related to the MERN stack 2 of which were live projects. Hence I shared my screen and elaborated with him with all the components and segments of the website. The interviewer was very familiar with the tech stack and asked several questions down the line :

1. Why use Node.js
2. What is API, and how it is different from RESTful API?
3. What is the major difference between MongoDB and SQL?
4. How is async and await used in this project code?
5. How did you integrate a payment portal into the website?

Tip: Don’t Lie! Build your own projects.

Round 5: HR Round (F2F virtual interview)

Total Duration: 30 – 45 minutes

The interviewer was very friendly and asked me to introduce myself briefly. He then introduced himself and briefed me about F5. It is a general conversation round with some behavioral and situational based questions like a typical HR round.

Verdict: Selected. (Out of 300+ students, 5 students were selected)

Tip: Be confident and genuine.