HSBC Interview Experience for Software Engineer Trainee

HSBC visited our campus for on-campus hiring. It was for the role of Software Engineer Trainee. It had 3 online rounds and 1 Technical Interview and 1 HR Interview.

There were 3 online rounds. Each one of them was an elimination round.

• Round 1: It consisted of MCQs related to CSE subjects such as Networking, DSA, and DBMS. The questions were not too hard. Just basics such as OSI layer, time complexity, SQL queries output. This round had immediate results, and only those students who had qualified were allowed to attempt the next round.
• Round 2: They asked 2 programming questions. Both of them were not too hard if you knew the basics. I don’t remember the exact questions but they were related to String and Array manipulation. Then we waited 2-3 days for results, and then around 450 students got an E-mail for the next round.
• Round 3: This was a values assessment round conducted online on a portal. Many questions were asked and they all had similar answers you had to pick 2 answers out of them which resembled you. I didn’t take this round seriously but got to know later that this is also an elimination round. But fortunately, I was lucky to qualify for further rounds. Around 100 students were eliminated in this round.

The next 2 were Interview rounds, and they were conducted on campus, and not virtually. This was my first time appearing for an interview offline as all the previous interviews for other companies were conducted online.

Around 21 panelists came for interviews, out of which 16 were for technical interviews and 5 for HR interviews.

Technical Interview: As usual he asked me to introduce myself. I don’t usually mention my siblings or my parents in my introduction, but he asked about them. 

• After that, he asked which language I am most proficient in. 
• Then he asked questions related to OOPS, Inheritance, and shallow copy vs Deep copy. 
• Then he told me that he is going to ask me a trick question. I thought it might be something too hard. But he just asked to get an input ‘N’ from the user and then print numbers from 1 to N without using loops (Hint – Recursion). I got the answer easily. 
• After this, he asked me to give him an approach to convert a number from numeric form to word form. Let’s say a user inputs 1001, then our program must output One Thousand. I haven’t encountered this question before, so I took my time and came up with an approach that was similar to the 2nd approach mentioned here –https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/convert-number-to-words/. He was satisfied with my answer. 
• Then he asked me why I had a year gap after the 12th. I replied that I prepared for JEE but unfortunately could not clear it. 
• He also asked why did I choose this college.

We got the result for this round in 5-6 minutes, and luckily I was among the 60 students who qualified for the HR Interview.

HR Interview:  The interview began with a basic introduction. 

• Then almost all of the questions were related to my resume.
•  He asked about my internship and the difficulties faced. He gave various situational questions, such as dealing with seniors in the company. 
• There was a question that he asked what if a senior disagrees with me, then how would I deal with that? 
• Finally, he asked, “Who invented Java?”. I replied with James Gosling for Sun Microsystems. He didn’t agree and then asked me to pull out my mobile phone to verify it. I googled it in front of him and fortunately, I was correct. The last one was actually a bit nervous.

Finally, we waited a day for the results. And 31 students out of the final 60 were selected, I was one of them ????. Now waiting to join from August 2023, as they don’t give internships.

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