How I was selected for System Engineer Specialist through HackWithInfy 2019 ?

HackWithInfy is a nation wide hackathon conducted by Infosys. It is open to all engineering students who are in final year of their graduation across disciplines of B.E./B.Tech/M.E./M.Tech from institutes in India.

Round 1: The 1st round was conducted on 1st July 2019 on Hackerrank platform, where we had to solve 3 coding question within 3 hours of time duration, whose difficulty level varied from medium – hard. Occasionally I use to practice on competitive coding platform like Codechef and had little bit of exposure to Hackerrank. According to me there different sets to every participant. In my situation I was able to solve only 1 question completely and 2nd question partially(I don’t remember how many test cases passed). 3rd question was bit difficult hence did not attempted it. Few weeks later I received an email that I had cleared round 1 and is eligible for round 2.

Round 2: This round was conducted on 14th July 2019. It was again a coding round conducted on the same platform with 3 coding questions to be solved in 3 hours. But this time there was a small change. This time the round was proctored i.e. the web camera of your system was “ON”, also we were not allowed open any other tab. Again I was able to solve the 1st question easily while in the 2nd question only 12 test cases passed out of 15. The 3rd questions was based on coloring the grid cells(I don’t remember the exact question now), which was probably difficult for me and hence left it.

Few weeks later I received an email from Infosys saying that I could not make it to the final round of the competition but was among the top scorers in the Round 2. Only 109 participants were selected for the Grand Finale. The same mail stated that I have received a PPI i.e. Pre-Placement Interview for the role of Systems Engineer Specialist (SES).

My interview was scheduled at Mukesh Patel School Of Technology Management & Engineering, Mumbai on 22nd August 2019. We where told to report at 08:30 am along with a list of documents. After reaching the destination I found that there where students from various engineering colleges in Mumbai, who had received PPI for roles of Systems Engineer Specialist(SES) and Power Programmer(PP). Also I found few old friends from 12th std classes over there. We where given a form to fill out, which consisted our personal details, educational details, project/internship details (if any) and hobbies. It was kind of a resume.

Round 3: This was an interview round, the first ever interview of my life.

1) He initially asked me about my family.

2) He then asked me how did I landed in this interview to which I replied “through the HackWithInfy Contest”.

3) He then asked me about my experience with HackWithInfy Competition, also some questions which I had solved in the contest.

4) In the contest I used Java language for solving the questions, to which he wrote a code to swap 2 numbers and started asking questions on it. I started feeling nervous over here, because I could not satisfactorily answer one of his question based on the swapping of 2 numbers.

5) He then asked me about how do I keep myself updated with the latest IT news. I replied that I am more interested in the cyber security field and hence read articles related to it on Google.

6) He then asked me about how to XSS Attack (Cross Side Scripting Attack).

7) After answering the above question, he asked my about which Linux distribution I use, to which I replied “Kali Linux”. He then asked me about it’s installation procedure. I use dual boot system and knew the steps, so said those.

8) Then he asked me about the name of the partition manager in Linux, which I didn’t knew. Nervousness started increasing.

9) Then he asked few commands of Linux like ‘ls’, ‘grep’, ‘cat’. He also asked me what does ‘top’ command does. My answer to the ‘top’ command was wrong(because of nervousness) to which he corrected me.

10) He then asked about CEO and founders of the Infosys. Adding to that, he also asked me why I wanted to join Infosys. I replied by saying that “I’m a fresher and always keep an attitude of learning. Also Infosys provides a great learning platform, which shall allow me explore my own capabilities and enhance my skills”.

After this I was told to leave and wait outside for the results. Finally the results were announced in the afternoon and was happy to hear my name. There where many more students who were left to be interviewed. Their results were declared in evening.