IBM India Software Labs Interview Experience 2023

There were 4 rounds in total (1 hacker rank test + 1 Psychometric Test + 1 Technical Interview + 1 Managerial round)

Cutoff: 7 CGPA with no active backlogs

Roles: SDE, SDET, QA and automation, Technical Content Writer

1st Round: Hackerrank Test

Had 2 easy questions and had to solve them in 60 mins. I don’t remember the question exactly since I’m writing this doc a long time after the test!

• Given an array of logs with the server name and status (either failed or successful) had to return the number of servers that failed 3 times in a row.

Example 1: logs = [“serverA failed”, “serverA failed”, “serverA failed”, “serverA failed”, “serverB failed”, “serverB failed”, “serverB failed”]

Output: 2

Example 2: logs = [“serverA failed”, “serverA failed”, “serverB failed”, “serverB failed”, “serverA failed”]

Output: 0

• I don’t remember the question properly but it was related to strings and DP. Given a list of strings, had to find the number of strings that met some conditions.

2nd Round: Psychometric Test

This is a very unique round that very few companies conduct. There were around 50 questions with options like strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree for each question. The kind of questions asked were like: I am very good at talking to people and I make friends very easily.

Also, you’ll be given 2 questions once and you can only choose 1 question to answer.

Tip: This test is used to find out your personality. The questions will be repetitive but will be framed differently. So if you lie, you’ll probably end up answering differently for the same question. So as long as you don’t lie, you should be fine!

After this round, they will send the resumes of all the shortlisted students to all the teams. So, getting shortlisted from here is purely resume based and their requirements. So make sure you add projects and skills that align well with their JD.

3rd Round: Technical Interview (45 mins)

Before I tell you my experience, I should tell you all that different candidates will have different kinds of questions because the interviews will be taken by the teams recruiting for that position. They don’t inform you for which team or for which role you have been shortlisted for. Other people who interviewed in this round had questions on CS basics (OS, CN, SQL), questions on projects mentioned in the resume and a few coding questions.

I was shortlisted by the Cloud Dev team. I had projects on Microservices, docker and kubernetes. So my interview was mostly on these things. Questions asked were pretty in-depth and could be answered only if you had practical knowledge on them. My interviewer didn’t ask any questions on CS basics.

We had spent more than 30 mins talking about only microservices, docker and kubernetes. Then they asked me basic DSA questions like code for binary search, reversing list, finding majority element without using extra memory (https://leetcode.com/problems/majority-element/). Then they asked me to explain recursion with a stack diagram. Then they asked me to print numbers from 1 to n and n to 1 using recursion.

4th Round: Managerial Round (40 mins)

This round was with a senior manager. They were very friendly and asked me questions about my internship project, family background, short term and long term goals, would you like to do masters or PHD in the future. They were trying to test if I knew what I was talking about so make sure you know what you’re telling and accept when you don’t know something.

Resources to prepare:

https://neetcode.io/ – DSA (neetcode 150 + blind 75 should be good enough for a lot of companies)

Introduction to Operating Systems Placements Course 2022 – OS playlist. MUST WATCH!

For Computer Networks there are no proper structured resources. I would suggest learning basics like OSI model layers, UDP vs TCP, IP protocol from Gate smashers or Neso Academy. Revise other important interview questions from GFG or interviewbit a day before your interview. Most of the companies ask only basic CN questions.