Tekion Interview Experience for Associate Software Developer | 2021-22

Almost 2000 students applied for the company out of which 170 were shortlisted on the basis of CGPA for the coding round. They didn’t mention the cutoff CGPA but it was clear that they only allowed students with 9+ CGPA.

Coding Round: The coding round was on the HackerEarth platform and it consisted of 16 MCQs and 2 coding questions. The MCQs were based on OS, DBMS, Networking, and OOPS fundamentals. There were also 1 or 2 aptitude questions too. The coding questions were of easy and medium level and the total time limit was 90 minutes for the whole test. They shortlisted 31 students from this round and the interviews were scheduled for the next day.

Technical Interview 1: The interviewer started with my introduction and then he asked me about OOPS features. He also asked me some disadvantages of OOPS. 

Then he asked me to write the code for a hashing function that should take a string as input and return the hashed value with the upper limit of 10000. I wrote a simple modulo operator-based function and then he asked me to suggest 3 ways to decrease the predictability of the function. I suggested that I can use complex and irreversible operations and can also stuff some bits after each character which can increase the security of the function.

The next question was related to URL pattern matching and he asked me how would you rank the match for a URL if it is matching with more than 1 pattern. It was really confusing but he explained the question very properly with the help of an example. I suggested I will first pick the longest matching patterns and then I will pick the pattern having variables (having a “:” in the beginning) and in the last, I will pick the patterns containing the wildcard (“*”) character. He also gave me a hint to think of it in the way of google’s page ranking algorithm which uses the number of inward and outward links to a page. I didn’t know these things properly but I didn’t give up and was continuously thinking out loud and the interviewer also appreciated this. This round went on for almost 2 hours for me but I remember other guys only had their interview for 1-hour max. Somehow then, I got shortlisted for the next round. 

Technical Interview 2: This round also started with a basic introduction and some OS questions like he asked me to explain the deadlock phenomenon with the help of a real-life example. Then he asked me about indexing in DBMS.

Next, he asked me to write a function for the tic tac toe game to check at a given point whether any of the players has won or the game is still going on. I first wrote the brute force approach code but with the help of the interviewer, I optimized it.

The next question was LCA of two nodes in a binary tree but he changed the tree structure. Instead of left and right pointers for each node, he told me that each node will have a parent pointer pointing to the previous level parent node. I first told him the recursive approach and then also the iterative approach using two auxiliary arrays. He was satisfied with these two and that was it for this round. This round was of 1-hour duration.

HR Round: This was a comparatively easier round as the interviewer didn’t ask anything technical to me. She just wanted to know about my interests and my hobbies. She also asked some basic HR questions like where do I see myself in the next 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years. She also asked me about the current web series I am watching :P. This round lasted almost half an hour.

We got the result the next day and total of 9 students were selected from my college and thankfully I was one of them.