Keysight Technologies Interview Experience 2023 (On-Campus)

Keysight Technologies came to our college for Internship Programme in July 2023.

They were offering 2 roles:-

• R&D intern
• IT intern

We could opt for both roles if we wanted to.

I applied for both roles.

P.S.: Gave the R&D one seriously :

They divided the entire procedure into 3 rounds.

• Online Aptitude Round
• Technical interview
• HR round

All were elimination rounds.

Details of each round are as follows :

Online Aptitude Round:

Almost 500 students applied.

This round had 40 questions to be completed in 60 minutes of time.

Topics covered: Aptitude (Quant, logical and verbal) and Computer Networks. Roughly 20 questions each.

Difficulty:

• Aptitude – Easy to Medium
• Computer Networks – Medium to Hard

To pass this round you need to have general concepts of all aptitude sections clear and be fast with calculations. To pass the Networks section you need to have a solid foundation and in-depth knowledge of Networking layers and protocols(far beyond our college syllabus). I will suggest reading Data Communication and Networking Book by Foruzan. It helped me a lot. Overall it’s competitive so you need to submit as early as possible.

Technical Interview:

25 students were shortlisted for the R&D role and 20 students for the IT role. I was selected for the R&D role.

It was a face-to-face interview. I was 3rd on the line. My interviewer was friendly.

• He introduced himself and asked me to do the same. He asked for my Resume and asked me to describe my favorite project. I described one of my full-stack projects in detail.
• He also asked some technical questions, tech stack, and applications regarding my project rather than going into deep technicality. After my explanations, he quickly switched to Java and asked me the following questions(as many as I remember) :
• Can we call the main function within itself? If yes how many times? How does Java know about it? Can Java dynamically allocate stack and heap space? If yes, how?
• Does the program stop running if it goes out of memory assigned at compile time? If not, what happens then? Can we apply virtual memory concepts in JVM?
• Difference between JRE and JVM. (He didn’t want bookish explanations)
• What are Java annotations? Why are they used? Give examples.
• Can we force a child class method to implement a parent class method implicitly? If yes, then how?
• Can we override the main function?
• Can Java have more than one main function?
• How does Java handle the Diamond problem in Inheritance? What’s the analogy with C++?
• When to use abstract class and interface? Give example.

After answering almost all of his questions, he looked satisfied and moved on to DSA. He asked me the following question. I didnt find the exact question on Internet.

• Find the maximum count of all distinct substrings.

I explained my approach using Hashmap, and being satisfied with my approach he asked me to write the code on a paper.

He gave some edge cases which I could explain in time. He also asked some further questions from HashMap about collision handling, linear probing and search time complexcity. The most tricky question was to answer when to use hashmap and when to use self-balancing BST.

The DSA questions were followed by Operating System questions. Here are the questions I could remember:

Explain process synchronization. Different types of it. Methods to handle it.

• What is the pipe?
• What is Monitor? What is exec() and fork()?
• Why is counting Semaphores used when we have binary Semaphores?
• Does the degree of multi-programming affect CPU performance? If yes, how? What is thrashing? How to avoid it?
• Explain briefly Inter-Thread Communication.
• After this, he moved to the last section i.e. Networks. Questions are as follows:
• What Routing protocols do you know of? when to use them? where to use them. Problems faced in each. How can you overcome it?
• Gave me 2 IP addresses and Mask and asked me if we would need routing to transfer packets between them. The answer was NO since they belonged to the same network address. The switch could handle the same.
• Why DNS uses UDP when we know UDP is unreliable?

I don’t remember many questions from this section.

My interview ended after an hour of commencing.

HR Round:

To my surprise, 7 people were shortlisted and I was one of them. 🙂

I missed my first scheduled meeting and was rescheduled. I apologized to HR for the inconvenience caused. She started off with my prior knowledge of Keysight if I had any. Honestly I didn’t know. Asked me about the job relocation to Bangalore and asked some general easy HR questions. At the last, she wished me All the best and ended the meeting!

The result was declared after almost 12 days and 6 people were selected and I was one of them. 😀

Thank you for reading, I hope this article will help you to gain some insight about the preparation for interviews. I have attached some resources and tips if you may consider.

Read Books well beforehand. It helps you to have a solid foundation in any subject. for last-minute preparation use notes or resources online.

• https://whimsical.com/operating-system-cheatsheet-by-love-babbar-S9tuWBCSQfzoBRF5EDNinQ – OS Notes by Love Babbar
• https://whimsical.com/networking-cheatsheet-by-love-babbar-FcLExFDezehhfsbDPfZDBv – CN Notes by Love Babbar
• https://whimsical.com/dbms-roadmap-by-love-babbar-FmUi8ffVop33t3MmpVxPCo – DBMS Notes by Love Babbar
• https://github.com/vineethm1627/OOP – OOPS notes by Love Babbar

For DSA, I have practiced from Love Babbar and Striver DSA sheets. Used Leetocode, gig, CodeChef, and code forces for increasing rating and speed.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/java/ – Java resources.

Be confident and honest.

Dong brag on your Resume. Use good keywords. Use templates from Overleaf.

Give mock interviews.

HAKUNA MATATA