A few days back, I received the much-coveted ‘Digital’ offer from TCS. This came after putting in a fair amount of effort in the coding and interview rounds of TCS Codevita Season 9 – 2020. I’ll share a recapitulation of the same, which I hope will help future aspirants, just like the earlier entries on GeeksforGeeks helped me.
Stage 1 (CodeVita Season 9 – 2020 Exam): Codevita is a pretty famous coding contest throughout the country and overseas. There were 6 coding questions of varying difficulty levels, to be solved in 6 hours. The questions are randomly shuffled, so no point asking a friend for their questions, who gave the test before you in the allocated window. I was able to solve 3 questions (completely) and got an AIR of about 400, and an interview call from TCS (it didn’t specify whether the interview was for Digital or Ninja).
Tip: There’re 6 hours, so do spend 15 mins to read every question thoroughly, and decide which ones you’ll be leaving out. Find a subset of question which you think you have a shot at (based on your self-determined skills), and then start solving them. Contrary to public opinion, your rank will decide if you receive an interview call, not the number of solved questions.
Stage 2 (Codevita Interview): Covid-19 messed up pretty much everything this year, so why not interviews as well? The interviews were scheduled online on the Microsoft Teams platform. Also, the mail for the interview came exactly one day before, so I had about 24 hours to prepare (didn’t do much before, to be honest). After waiting impatiently from 10 am, my call came at about 5 pm. Three people were in the call, and each of them interviewed me one after the other no gaps in between.
Technical Round:
-
Introduce yourself.
Did, focused on both technical aspects, soft skills, and hobbies.
-
Tell me about the projects you listed on your resume.
I had 2 projects on Machine Learning (and the associated technologies), so I asked permission to share screen, and showed them the result figures, and explained what I was doing. I took my time, and he didn’t hurry me. They seemed pretty impressed.
-
So you have done these projects in Python, is that your favored language?
Yes. I explained why I liked Python best, but also stressed on my knowledge in Java and C++.
-
Gave a small Python code in the chat and asked me to debug it.
Did. It was pretty basic.
-
Explain the ACID properties of Databases.
Did. I forgot what ‘D’ stood for, but still explained the purpose of ‘D’. They seemed okay with it.
-
Explain all about the different types of Database Languages (DDL, DML, etc…)
Did. Gave examples of each type of command.
-
A question on WebD
Sir, I can answer that, but WedD is not my domain. I chose the AI elective over WebD in college and my interests are in ML and AI field. They appreciated my honesty.
-
Explain Regression in detail.
Did.
-
Explain the normalization concept in DBMS.
Did
-
Explain the classification methods you know of.
Told about K-means and DBSCAN in details.
-
Difference between 3NF and BCNF?
I faltered in this.
-
Explain the 4 basic properties of OOP?
Did
-
Explain the difference between Overloading and Overriding.
Did
Managerial Round:
-
So, you have guitar listed as your hobby – asked a few questions about how and where I learned, and where I played.
I got the feeling that he was into music, so I engaged in a casual conversation on music, as I would do with a friend.
-
Tell me about your internship – what did you do and how did you work?
Did, in detail.
-
There are 2 walls. You are at one of them. At each step, you take 1/2 the remaining distance between the other wall. This way, mathematically you can never cross the other wall, but you do. How?
Tried a variety of answers that I could come up with on the spot, but they didn’t get what they were looking for.
HR Round:
-
Asked about football – also listed on my resume.
Got the feeling that he was into football, and again engaged in a friendly conversation about the sport.
-
Standard HR questions like why TCS, open to relocation, etc?
Answered.
-
Since this is a completely online interview, hold up a physical copy of your documents, so we can verify them.
Did
-
Any questions?
Told them it was my second ever interview and asked them for feedback on what I could improve on.
Interviewer: Gave tips…
That was it. The undocumented “Suspense Round” commenced after that and that took place for about 2 1/2 weeks. After that, I received a mail with the Digital offer. Yay! Only 8 students (all from CSE) from our college received the Digital offer. Another 40 received the Ninja offer.
Tips: NEVER falter in your answers or show a lack of confidence. Expect at least 2-3 questions that you wouldn’t know – remain confident and tell them honestly if you can’t answer. Engage with your interviewers – think of it as an after-hours ‘canteen talk’ with your mates. Remember they are bored by the monotonic interviews as well (especially if your slot comes late in the day – something you can’t do much about). Give them something that would make them sit up and take notice.
All the very best guys! 🙂