SAP Labs Interview Experience

SAP labs came to our campus in the month of August and the whole process consisted of 5 rounds and lasted 2 days. 

Day 1 

Round 1(Aptitude Test – 90 mins): The criteria to appear in the placement process were: 

1. > 60% in 10th and 12th standard. 
2. 7 CGPA and above till 6th semester of Engineering. 

Aptitude exam comprises of Logical, Quantative and programming questions with 2 coding questions. 

• The logical and quantative questions are of medium difficulty and can be solved quickly if you are practising regularly. 
• The programming MCQs are easy and you should be able to score well in them.The questions are from a variety of topics such as DBMS, Operating systems, Algorithim analysis and basic data structures. 
• There are 2 coding questions of medium difficulty and each of them have twenty test cases to check your code.Be careful of the corner cases as they carry extra marks. 
• Out of nearly 100 candidates 22 were shortlisted for interviews. 

Day 2 

Round 2(Technical Round 1 – 40 mins): The first technical round is of medium difficulty and it tests your knowledge in the subjects you are comfortable with. 

• There were 2 interviewers and both of them were extremely warm and helped me settle my nerves. 
• They started by asking me about myself and what are my hobbies. They also asked me about the places I liked to visit in the city, this really helped me feel at ease. 
• Then I was asked about my favorite subjects and why I liked them. I told them I liked Database management systems as they are present universally in different forms and Cloud computing because it is what makes applications run in the real world. 

Then started the questions. 

• Question 1: I was asked to design a relational database for a company described by the interviewer and asked to write 2 queries according to the design. 
• Tip: Make sure the database design is such that most of the data retrieval can be done using easy queries because the queries are bound to be complex. 
• Question 2: The interviewer asked me to write a code related to linked lists and to write it’s complexity. 
• Tip: Make sure you are able to explain your code well and are able to visualize the data structure you are working with. 
• Question 3: I was asked to differentiate between PaaS, SaaS and IaaS and also asked to give examples for each. 
• Then I was given a blank sheet of paper and was asked to write all the terms related to cloud computing which I knew about and then I was asked to explain each term. 
• Tip: Do not explain anything incorrectly, only explain what you are sure of, otherwise give it a try and mention that you are not sure about it. 
• The next few questions were about the projects I did during my internship. 
• It was a pleasant interview and time really flew by. 

Round 3(Technical Round 2 – 50 mins): (Felt like an eternity) 

• After the first round 11 people were shortlisted for the 2nd technical round. 
• The interview began with the 2 panellists asking me about my first technical interview and what projects I talked about in the 1st round. 
• I thought this round too would be of similar sorts but it was excruciatingly in- depth. 
• To warm me up I was asked about OOP and it’s concepts in detail with the interviewer taking me to the depth of every term I mentioned. 

After the exhausting ‘warm up’ was complete. 

• Question 1: I was asked to classify all human beings using OOP. 
• I was stumped for a while but then I told the interviewer about my thought process and he guided me through. 
• He asked me about why I was making a particular choice during classification and why I am ignoring the other. 
• He asked which concept was I implementing while performing the classification and from an abstract problem he drove me down to a raw OOP answer. 
• He wasn’t too impressed with my approach and further grilled me on OOP. 
• E.g. He asked me how will I use inheritance to show a family tree, whether I should make gender a class or a data member of a class and which method will take care of a sex change operation if there is one. He then asked me about function overloading and overriding by telling me to take an example of how humans when eat food produce energy and if eat junk produce CO2. ( The fact that the questions were so relatable probably made it a little easier for me to answer). 
• I never realized OOP can be thought of in this way and I was fascinated by the way the problem was framed. 
• This was perhaps the most difficult set of questions in the whole process mainly because I was bombarded with questions which required me to jump from one concept to another.I considered OOP as one of my strongest subjects before this interview but after this I was in self doubt. 
• I was extremely nervous after this and then I was given a simple puzzle which I could not solve maybe because my mind was still thinking about the previous question. 
• Tip: If you can’t answer a question stop thinking about it and move to the next with a fresh approach. 
• Then the second interviewer asked me about Operating systems and software engineering concepts. She asked me about the SDLC for about 10 minutes.I was able to answer them correctly. 
• I was almost certain I won’t make it to the next round. 

But to my surprise I did. 

Round 4(Managerial Round – 20 minutes): Only 2 candidates were selected for the managerial round.