IBM Interview Experience for ISDL | On-Campus 2022

Round 1: IBM Cognify

Time: 30 minutes

A 30 min test aptitude/ cognitive test asks puzzle types of questions. You can see the types of questions and prepare on https://prepinsta.com/ibm/cognitive-ability-games/. There are 5 types of puzzles you’ll need to solve a given time limit.

1. Shortcuts: You will need to move the blue marble to the starred area. The aim is to do sufficiently as possible for each puzzle. People who will do this are likely to have strong Reasoning and aptitude knowledge.
2. Gridlock: You will solve a succession of puzzles by fitting all pieces into the grid as quickly as you can. People who will do this are likely to have strong general and spatial reasoning skills.
3. Resemble: You will need to mentally rotate the image on the left and then replicate it on the right. People who will do this are likely to have strong general and spatial reasoning skills.
4. Numbubbles: You will be given a target number and needs to identify and pop the bubbles with the equation that equals the target number. People who will do this are likely to have strong quantitative and fluid reasoning skills.
5. Tally Up: You will need to quickly identify which group of tokens has the highest value. People who will do this are likely to have strong quantitative and fluid reasoning skills.

Round 2: Coding Test On HackerRank

Time: 66m

There were 14 questions in total, 10 were MCQs related to the subjects of Operating Systems, Computer Networks, DBMS and C outputs. 4 questions were coding questions as follows :

1. Check if a string input is a pangram or not. (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/pangram-checking/)
2. Check if a given input string satisfies the production grammar provided. 
3. Longest Palindrome of a string. (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/longest-palindrome-substring-set-1/)

Round 3: Technical Round

Time: 60m 

After qualifying for the Coding and Cognify tests, I got an email from IBM(after 1w) saying that I have a panel interview where there were 2 interviewers present. 

1. They started off with – “Introduce yourself” and then went onto a live coding round where I had to share my screen and show code out the questions they had asked. One question they asked me was to print out an array in the form of JSON and the other question was to write a pseudo code of how I would delete a node from a doubly linked list.
2. They then moved on to asking me IQ/Logic questions, one was the minimum number of cuts required to cut a cake in 8 equal parts and another one was to measure 45 minutes given 2 strings of equal length and that they burn in one hour. These were kinda tricky and you really need to think out of the box for these. 
3. Since I had experience working with ReactJS and NodeJS (which happened to be some of the requirements for them), they asked me quite a few questions related to those topics. Be prepared to answer in-depth; know the Why, Where, How of everything you answer.

The meeting concluded with them asking me about some OOPS concepts.
Round 4:Managerial Round

Time:30m

1. I got an email for the HR round the same day. There was one panellist present and she asked me about my internships and projects, the technical and non-technical issues I faced during these. She asked me what my favourite subjects in college were, what is my favourite application, what was one of my favourite innovations that were born during the lock-down period. Since I showed interest in Cloud Computing, she asked me a few questions related to the same.
2. She concluded the meeting with any questions I had for her.

Tip:Always have a question handy, whether it be about the work culture at the company, or if they need you to be familiar with any specific tech stack if there is anything that you need to improve upon. This will give you an advantage over others.

The overall interview experience was quite good. The panellists are quite friendly, the entire process was smooth. I still haven’t gotten the final shortlist results. Fingers crossed..