Round 1: Coding round
It was an online coding round named HackWithInfy, organized by Infosys. Registration for the exam begins around 1 month before the exam.
It has 3 coding problems to be solved in 180 minutes with any of your programming languages. I was able to solve 2 problems fully and the difficulty was easy to hard for these problems.
It is known that;
- Participants who were in the top 100 ranks will advance to the finals of HackWithInfy which is a hackathon and will also they are offered a pre-placement interview opportunity for the Specialist Programmer role.
- Participants who were able to solve 2 questions completely or more will be offered a pre-placement interview opportunity for the Specialist Programmer role.
- Participants who were able to solve 1 question completely will be offered a pre-placement interview opportunity for the Digital Specialist Engineer role.
Note: The above stats may vary according to the difficulty of the problems.
The results were out after around 40 days and I got the pre-placement interview offer for the SP role. After some months, my interview was scheduled on Microsoft Teams.
Round 2: Technical Interview
First, I was asked to introduce myself. After that, I was given a problem statement and I was asked to screen share, open the IDE of my choice and solve the problem in any one programming language. The problem was related to string manipulation. The interviewer gave me 25 minutes to implement the solution. I was able to do it in around 10 minutes.
Then I explained the implementation. The interviewer was kind of happy to see me thinking out loud, speaking while thinking of the solution, speaking while coding, speaking while testing and speaking even while correcting errors.
Later, she moved on to the Computer Fundamentals. Following were the questions, I was asked.
- Explain the method of overriding and overloading.
- Explain Inheritance.
- Explain Multiple Inheritance. Why is it not supported in Java? In what other way can we achieve it?
- What is a Friend Function?
- Explain the difference between left join and right join.
- Approach to write a query to find the second highest salary in the employee table
- Difference between view and table?
- Further, I was asked about design patterns, it was helpful for me as it is covered in my college curriculum. (An underrated topic, would suggest everyone learn it before their interviews.)
- Explain SDLC and all its steps in brief.
- Explain dfs, bfs. Where are they used?
- Explain the Set, List and Hashmap.
- Sometimes complexity-related questions in map.
Verdict: Offered the role. Indeed my first job offer.
I would suggest:
- Participate in online coding contests as much as you can. This will help you with logic building and improving your speed immensely.
- Don’t ignore fundamental subjects like OOP, DBMS, OS, and CN.
- Prepare well for your projects.
In your next coding interview, think out loud. Speak while coding. Speak while testing. Speak while debugging and correcting errors. This will get you 100% undivided concentration on the problem.
All the best!