JPMorgan Chase – Code for Good Interview Experience for Software Engineer FTE

This time around, JPMC didn’t come for campus placements and this was their only way of hiring the 2022 grads. Because of the covid-19 scenario, everything was done in a virtual environment.

Round 1(Coding Test): There was only a coding test and no MCQs. The questions were very simple and you should be able to solve all of them.

1. Given a binary string count the number of substring starting and ending with 
2. Merging Intervals

Platform: HackerRank

Test duration: 90 mins

Round 2(Video Interview/Behavioral): The invites for this were sent to the registered email-ids and had a link to attend the interview. It had 2 pre-recorded questions and we were given 1 min to think about the answer and then record the answer. For each question, you can make at most 2 attempts. i.e. you can re-record your answer to a question if you weren’t satisfied with the 1st attempt. However, I would recommend you to finish both the questions in the first attempt and be confident and fluent while answering the questions as some of my friends who cleared the coding round weren’t able to clear this round.

1. Explain what difficulties you faced in your last work/project experience and how you came up with the solution.
2. What is your goal in life?

Platform: Hirevue

Test duration: 5-10 mins

Final Round – Code for Good Hackathon: After a long wait for over a month, during the end of May, I got an email stating that I was among the 650 students who made it to the Code For Good Hackathon. There was a total of 92 teams with about 6-7 students per team. It was a 24hr hackathon. However, we had few other sessions lined up right before the hackathon date.

• 17th and 18th June 2021 – We had multiple workshops, webinars, etc and also got to know our teammates. During this period, they rolled out invites to join the team Github repo, slack channel, and hackathon portal on BeMyApp. All these are really essential and if you have any queries or issues joining these then immediately ask for help.
• 19 to 20 June – 24hr Hackathon: The day started from 8 am with all the NGO’s presenting their problem statements. As this was the biggest CFG hackathon ever with 92 teams, they divided the 10 NGOs among the group of (Team1 – Team 46) and (Team 47-92). We were given some time to discuss and choose our problem statement on the bemyapp platform. Allocation was on a first-come-first-serve basis, so we had to prioritize which problem statement we wanted. There we 2 mentors assigned to each team and these are ppl that will judge your individual performance. There will also be SME’s(subject matter experts) that will help you throughout the hackathon with any technical issues.
• Presentation:  The hackathon ended on 20th June @ 11:00 am. Then we were given a short break and had to come back to present our solution to the technical judges. These judges are the employees of JPMC who have a good amount of engineering experience in the company. Out of 9 teams(for our problem statement), top 3 were chosen, who presented to the final jury.
• Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it to the top 3 and were out of the finals.
• The winners of the hackathon are announced on 20th June itself.

Note/Tips:

1. Discuss with your teammates before the hackathon, about their tech stack and discuss which tech stack your team should be working on. Trust me if you do the discussion during the hackathon day, you will waste a lot of time.
2. Be very interactive in the team but do not dominate the discussion. Your mentors monitor each and every activity you do and are the ones who will decide whether JPMC should hire you.
3. Try to invest good time in planning and dividing work before jumping into coding right away. Help your teammate if they have issues and do not hesitate to ask the help of SME’s.
4. Winning the hackathon doesn’t mean you will get hired, or Losing the Hackathon doesn’t mean you will not get hired.
5. Also allocate a good amount of time to prepare the final ppts and the project demo video(Yes they will ask you to record a 7 min video and upload it) because once it is past 11, the portal closes, and submissions are no longer accepted. As per my suggestion, at least 2 hrs.

End result:  After about 20 days, JPMC will start rolling out the selected candidates list for the Software Engineer(FTE) position to your college’s placement cell. I was lucky to be selected. From our college, about 35 students were selected for the job role.

All the best!!!