HSBC Interview Experience for Trainee Software Engineer 1 (On-Campus)

I applied through college or university. The process took 5 weeks (from application in early September, then an online test which included aptitude, English, and maths questions along with a coding test which had 2 simple coding questions (both easy-level questions) at the end of September results came a few days after then a value assessment test took place). Finally, I interviewed at HSBC (Pune) in early Oct 2023.

Interview

The interviewer was very experienced in mainframe & cloud (20 years ex). He was more focused on cloud technologies, and less on other stuff like cp/dsa. He gave me questions and immediately after my answers gave me satisfactory answers so that I could prepare for the next answer in a similar manner, I believe this was a good step by the interviewer as I got a hint of how the interviewer expected answers to questions.

Grilled me on my cloud-knowledge, luckily I had a project in my resume so I survived there. Apart from this, I would suggest having at least 1 big project that you can explain in-depth for a lot of time, like in my case out of 45 min of interview (mine was a bit long as I had more experience and more projects to explain. I was first to go in and last to come out of my batch for interview-panelist, but generally they last for 30 min), for at least 20-25 min I spoke on my projects & interviews and my contributions there. The rest were some basic core questions and then results were told just after the interview by other team members (selected or not). Some of my friends had system-design-heavy interviews, while some of them had CP/data-centric interviews. Here for the good interviewer, Luck matters!

Interview Questions

Tell me more about yourself: Explain yourself easily.

• Tell me cloud benefits you know: Easy answer
• Tell me cloud disadvantages and risks: Grilled me on this one, as his main focus was on my understanding of cloud
• Tell me about your experience on a cloud! Have you worked in the cloud or have any projects in the cloud: I have worked on cloud databases (NoSQL – MongoDB Atlas, SQL – railsApp), AWS (built serverless automation apps on AWS,), deployed applications on AWS, had idea of Azure. So, I think this was where the interviewer was impressed.

Then interviewers moved to OS Fundamentals. His questions were quite practical like –

• What does OS do? what features it does handle?
• Can Laptop/PCs Run without OS? – 99% Yes, 1% No. You need to handle the system by yourself as you will no longer have the support of the kernel. You have to manage your memory by yourself, interact in machine language, for storage/computation, etc but yes you can do that.
  Then for general questions to see if the person is technically hirable/interested in the role.
• Tell me about your past experiences, internships, and projects – one by one he asked me about the internships I was part of, my contributions, how I interacted with the team, etc. Then he got into some of my main projects.
  Then in the last 10 minutes, he gave me pen-paper to write answers to the following questions using any language
• Pattern creation question

* * * 
* *
* 
* * 
* * *

Diving the above figure into two sections(upper triangle and lower triangle), I wrote the answer in Python easily.

• He gave me a table for transactions. It was a simple SQL Query regarding date-time, group by, and min-max (it’s a banking firm after all)
• Then he asked me if I had any questions regarding him/his team. No not leave this. Keep them interested. (I asked about tech stacks used at HSBC, about various teams at HSBC, etc)

Then I was informed 5 min later that I would have my HR after 30 minutes (lunch).

HR was too interviewer-centric. Some of them lasted for 30 minutes while mine hr round only lasted for 5-10 minutes.

HR asked me –

• How are you?
• Tell me about yourself
• Your preferred location (Pune / Hyderabad / Bangalore)
• Tell me one project where you were part of a big team. Your role & contributions. What did you learn in that project?

Then he told me to ask the next person to be in (surprisingly that next person to me was rejected in the HR round!)

Accepted Offer: Yes

Positive Experience: Yes