This is an assessment and interview experience of IBM for the Associate Systems Engineer role. It was labeled something as “IBM Code Knack” and in my case, it was a Pool Campus Drive consisting of two colleges. (2024 freshers batch)
Tip: If you have already applied for this role off-campus don’t worry use the same reference ID to fill up the new registration form. Don’t change your email and re-apply because you will get problems regarding mail later.
Round 1 (Coding round)
You have to solve 1 coding question within 45 minutes.
There were just two questions shuffled among all the students. The one that I got was an easy one: Convert a number to Roman form. There was another question which people said was not so easy as this one. I don’t remember the exact statement but it was something like “Convert Linux commands into octal”.
Round 2 (English assessment)
There were 3 to 4 sets of English MCQ questions regarding synonyms, one word for.., spelling errors, etc. One of the sets had negative markings. There were about 3 minutes for each section and questions were unlimited – the more you answer the more you score. Be careful about this round because everyone thought it was the easiest, but surprisingly many of the candidates got eliminated.
Round 3 (Group Discussion)
My topic was “Online shopping vs Offline shopping”
It was like an Extempore + GD. You have to raise your hand up and the coordinator will let everyone state their opinion one by one. After that, you can cross-question or do a discussion. It was very short and the Sir/Madam was very friendly. Everyone was feared for this round but not many were eliminated.
Round 4 (Interview)
This was a technical + HR interview and difficulty was very different for different candidates. Some of them were asked more HR questions while some were asked more technical. Entirely depended on the interviewer. The questions I was asked were –
- Tell me about yourself and your family.
- Important subjects you have learnt in your 3 years of Btech and your favourite one.
- Important algorithms you have learnt. Then he told me to explain Binary Search.
- Which database you have used in college for DBMS. (I said MySQL) So he asked me what important operations have you done in MySQL. He then told me to write queries to Insert and Update.
- What important topics have you learnt in Networking.
- Then he asked me to explain one of the personal projects I have done. I used an ORM instead of SQL for the database in my project so he told me to write detailed codes of how I implemented some of the operations in the ORM. And some other questions like what are the tables used, the model and structure, important functions etc.
- Then he asked some other HR questions like how much would you rate yourself as a learner, problem in relocating or not. How talented are you in your hobbies you have mentioned.
Lastly he told me to learn Java before joining them or any other company (Because I mentioned Python and C++ as my top languages and kept Java as secondary), did some laugh and chit-chats and ended the interview. He was a friendly guy and everything went well but I messed up the project part because I didn’t expect them to ask detailed codes about projects (which I definitely copied from the internet.
VERDICT : Although my interview wasn’t that good but I guess they judged based on overall performance or communication skills. 2 days later I was informed that I was selected. You can be too.