Texas Instruments Interview Experience (Off-Campus) 2023

I got an email from HR regarding the Internship opportunity at the Bengaluru Office of Texas Instrumentation on MPU Sitara as a Software Architect Intern. He asked me to send a resume if I was interested.

I sent my resume and after a week it was accepted. Then my technical interview was scheduled with an engineer. I was told beforehand that the questions would be from topics around C language, operating systems, computer architecture, and basic programming skills.

In the Interview, I was given a shared code editor link and was told to present my screen as well. The questions are as follows

• Reverse an integer: He asked me to code this question. After coding it, I was asked that is there any case where reverse(reverse(N)) !=N. The answer was that if we have an integer whose reverse is going out of the limits of the datatype then it may fail.
• He asked if I was comfortable with pointers or not and based on it I was given a code snippet and was expected to predict the output of the code without running it.
• Next, he asked me to define structure in C with one integer, one float, and one character. After I wrote the structure, He asked me to write about how can I use this inside of another function. Next, he asked me to send the structure as an argument inside of another function.
• Next, I was asked another question that assume there is a function called rand() which will give some random 10-bit integer values as output. If it is running in a loop then break the loop whenever rand() will print a number which it has printed initially. These were easy-to-do questions considering the HashSet. Since we are given 10 bits. You can create a boolean of 1024 values.
• What is the kernel and its role in computers?
• If you write a program with an infinite loop on a Linux computer, can you hang the machine?
• If you write a program while(1) it hangs? why? If the compiler does not optimize then what happens?
• What is Cache? Explain L1,L2,L3 Cache.
• int x = 0x0000abcd; set 17th bit of X (set means make 17th bit = 1) and Toggle 17th bit (toggle means if 17th bit =0 make it one, if bit = 1 make it 0)
• There is a function in C called memcpy what it does do? Write a code to implement the same custom function.
• What are Mutex and Semaphore?

This technical interview went on for about an hour and some extra minutes. In the end, I was asked if I have any questions then I asked about I am passionate about contributing to Kernel and want some guidance. He gave me a link to https://kernelnewbies.org/ which is really a good site to start your kernel journey. I was qualified for the next round.

I was then given a link to an online coding assessment which has around 40 objective questions all of them on COA and OS and some basics of C. After a week I was promoted to HR round.

HR Round happened on a telephone call. On this call, I was asked about my technical journey, Availability to work at the Bengaluru office for a minimum of 2 weeks, Open Source contributions and interests in technology, and Where I see myself in the next 5 years.

Finally, a few days later, I received an offer letter from an HR team for my 2 months internship.

I would say, The company’s evaluation process was fair enough and nothing off-topic was asked. All the things were around the internship work only. Great interview experience overall.