Background:
- Education: Bachelor’s in Information Technology from YMCA Faridabad College, which is a Tier-2 college.
- Experience: Fresher
- Coding Experience: Grinded Leetcode and GeeksforGeeks for Data Structure Questions, along with maintaining some of the Competitive Programming profile of CodeChef by regularly giving programming Contests from the 4th semester.
Preparation: I know very well that if anyone wants to ace the Technical Interviews, Then the Data Structure and Algorithms must be at my fingertips, Therefore, I started learning Data Structure and Algorithms in my 4th Semester and started giving online contests. My preparation strategy consists of below points:
- For understanding the basic functionalities of Java, like the internal working of Arrays, ArrayList, and Memory Management, I used to see the videos of Kunal Kushvaha on Youtube.
- For topics like Stack, Sliding Windows, and Dynamic Programming, I used to watch videos of Aditya Verma from Youtube.
- Binary Trees and Binary Search Trees are prepared from TakeUForward.
- Graphs, binary Search, and remaining Dynamic Programming concepts are learned through the videos of Striver.
- With the hard work of around 2-3 months, I was able to solve all 455 questions of Data Structure and Algorithms of the Striver SDE sheet, which mostly helped me to prepare very well in my Technical Rounds.
- After that, I regularly give contests on Leetcode and Codechef, which increased my confidence for Technical Interviews.
Interview Experience: Samsung came to our campus for placement in the 7th semester. They allowed sitting students with CGPA above 7 having no backlogs till now. I have a current CGPA of 7.8 and no backlogs, therefore I was able to sit for it. So I was well prepared for that because I started the preparation in the 4th semester itself. There were total 4 rounds for SDE interviews, description of all 4 rounds is as below:
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Round 1 (Online Assessment):
- The first round was an online assessment round, As it was an on-campus opportunity. So that round took place at the TPO (Training and Placement Office) of our college. As the number of candidates applying was large numbers, Therefore, there were two shifts of online Assessment, One in the morning and the other in the evening. I was in the morning slot. OA was of 3 hours and consists of only 1 Question of Hard level. That too from Dynamic Programming. The question was Burst Balloons | Practice | GeeksforGeeks. We can compile the question as many times as we want but we can submit the code at most 10 times. So, one has to be careful about syntax and logic written in code. There were 50 test cases, and we have to pass all the cases for a duration of 3 hours. If any of the test cases got failed, Then I can’t qualify for further rounds. Hopefully, I cleared all of the test cases within the time limit and got qualified for the next round.
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Round 2 (Technical Round):
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This was an on-site round. When I was called for the interview, I was quite nervous, Then I took a deep breath and move for the interview, this round was taken by an SDE-I having 2 years of experience. Then he asked me some CS Fundamental questions like This interviewer asked me some questions on CS fundamentals like DBMS and OOPs, the questions were:
- Difference between SQL and NoSQL
- What are the Semaphores?
- What are the DeadLock Conditions and how to overcome them?
- Some Basic OOPs questions like Inheritance, Polymorphism, Encapsulation, and types of classes in Java as well.
- Then the interviewer gave me one Data Structure and Algorithm question and told me to provide an optimized approach to that question. Hopefully, I have done this question before, So there was no difficulty for me to solve this particular problem. First, I discuss the brute force solution of O(N2). Then slightly moved towards the optimized one by discussing some patterns. The question was to find the maximum length sub-array of sum 0 Largest subarray with 0 sum | Practice | GeeksforGeeks. My optimized approach was O(N) time complexity and O(N) Space for using HashMap. All over this was a basic technical round, I found no difficulty in clearing this.
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This was an on-site round. When I was called for the interview, I was quite nervous, Then I took a deep breath and move for the interview, this round was taken by an SDE-I having 2 years of experience. Then he asked me some CS Fundamental questions like This interviewer asked me some questions on CS fundamentals like DBMS and OOPs, the questions were:
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Round 3 (Technical Round):
- There was another technical round taken by an SDE with 4 years of experience. In this round, the interviewer focused more on the projects and asked one DS Algo question too. The DS question was Top view of the binary Tree Top View of Binary Tree | Practice | GeeksforGeeks. I provided the optimized solution followed by the brute one, The interviewer look quite satisfied with my approach.
- Then he moved towards the discussion on my projects, I put 2 projects in my resume, First was an Android Chat Application and another project was based on Machine Learning. So, The interviewer asked me first about the life cycle of an Android application, then he asked about the internal working of the application, Like how messages go from one user to another, Database used to store messages. I gave answers according to the questions asked by him and he look quite satisfied with my answers. After that, He asked to explain the working of the second project, which was based on Machine learning. I also explained that project as well. Most of the time, He wants to know whether, If I know the basic functionalities used in the projects or not, And I stood up on these things very well by giving accurate answers. I was completely sure, I will qualify for this round as well.
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Round 4 (HR Round):
- This was a basic HR round, like other interviews. He was quite an experienced person of 8 YOE. He asked me to start with my experience. I provide my basic experience with education, family background, and how I got my interest in Software Development. Then he asked me about the experience of the last two rounds. I told them what I feel during those rounds and the problems they gave me to solve. After that, he asked me about my projects. Any time I was giving an answer, He was trying to cross-question with the follow-up questions. I gave the answers, as it was given in 3rd round.
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After a quite long discussion, He asked me some basic behavioral questions from me. Like:
- Where do you want to see yourself, after 5 years?
- Why you want to join Samsung.
- Do you have any experience the software development before?
- After that, He told to me, Have you any questions for me? Then I asked him what it feels like to be a software engineer when you were a fresher and his day to day to responsibilities now after 8 YOE. As the time was less, so he told his experiences with me in a short span of time and told good luck to me.
Verdict: Selected.
Tips: Try to be real during the interviews, If you don’t know something about a particular question asked then simply say I don’t know about this sir/mam and show your eagerness to learn by saying can you tell me about this more? Don’t put anything in your resume, that you don’t know, like a skills advanced skill or any other thing, Here cross-questioning from a resume may stick you during the interview process.
Last but not least, I would recommend preparing for the on-campus 1 year before the placement season, so that at the last moment it will not as a burden to you. Regularly participating in contests motivates us and trains us to perform very well in time-limited interviews and OAs.