Symantec Interview Experience | Set 4 (On-Campus)

Symantec Interview Experience Procedure

Round 1 – Online Test
The Online round was hosted by HackerRank. There was a total of 22 questions. The time given was 1 ½ hours. Every correct answer carried 1 mark and every wrong answer carried -1 mark.
Out of the 22 questions, 20 questions were MCQ which covered topics like C/C++, Data Structures, Algorithms, OS, aptitude, etc.
The other 2 questions were coding. The instructions specified that solving 1 would be enough. But the questions were very easy, so I did both since there was a lot of time left. One thing to note here is to take care of the time complexity of the solution. If it has bad time complexity, all of the 15 test cases might not pass.
Around 150 people took up the test in my college and around 60 people cleared the round. They were asked to come to the Symantec office in Chennai for the face to face interviews.
Round 2 – Face to face interviews:
The interviews started at 10.30 am and went on till 6.00 pm. There was a break in between for 1 hour for lunch. Around 100-120 people had come for the interviews from various colleges.

• Initially, before they started, they gave a sheet of paper in which we had to rate ourselves on different subjects like C/C++, Java, DBMS, System Operations, etc. on a scale of 10.
  There was a total of 3 face to face technical interviews. All of them were elimination rounds.Each of the rounds lasted for about 30-45 mins.
• In the 1st round of the technical interview, he asked a lot of theoretical concepts, aptitude, and a little bit of coding. This round mainly concentrates on your fundamentals and basics of computer science. For aptitude, they asked questions from trigonometry and age problems.
  Around 40 people cleared the 1st round and made it to the 2nd round of interviews.
• The 2nd round concentrated more on my coding skills. It was also face to face, and I was asked to write the code on a sheet of paper and explain the algorithm used to solve it. I was asked questions based on implementation of stack, linked list, queue, etc. One question which stood out was – given a string, find all possible combinations of letters of that string.
  Solution for that problem is:
  https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-all-combinations-of-given-length/
  But the difference in the question he asked was – I have to print for all k values from 1 to n (n – length of the given string).
  For eg. Given string – “abc”. Solution – {a, b, c, ab, ba, ac, ca, bc, cb, abc, acb, bac, bca, cab, cba}.
  I answered all the questions except the one mentioned above.

Round 3
The 3rd round of the technical interview was not held for everyone. It was more like a 2nd chance for those people who did not do the 2nd round very well. I didn’t attend the 3rd round. They directly pushed me to the 4th round.
The 4th round was called Managerial round. It was like a HR round where they also asked puzzles other than the regular HR questions like “Why Symantec?”, “Are you placed already?”, etc.
In the end around 20 people were shortlisted for the internship. The results came out a few days later.
They provided lunch and snacks for all the candidates who attended the process. They showed around the entire office during the process of the interviews since each round took place in a different floor in the building.
Overall, it was a nice experience and the interviews were carried out smoothly by the Symantec team without any delays.