Texas Instruments Interview Experience (Off-Campus ) for SDE 2

Hi, I recently went through the interview process at Texas Instrument. On 18th May, a recruiter from Naukri.com reached out to me regarding SDE2 [ G 26 Level ] position at Texas Instruments. They have a G24 position which is equivalent to SDE 1 and a G26 position which is equivalent to SDE 2. I was being interviewed for G26 as I had 2.9 Years of experience.

Timeline: The complete process took around 2 weeks.

HR asked for all my details and then scheduled the First round of interviews for 24th May.

Round 1 ( F2F ): The interviewer introduced herself and asked me to tell him about my current work and project. He told me that it was his first time taking interviews. The interviewer was very nice. This went on for around 10 minutes then he started asking questions.

• What is the Endianness of a machine?
• Write a C program to know the endianness of a machine.
• Given a number x, and two integers ‘l’ and ‘r. You have to find the return the number in x from the range of l to r bits. 
  • Example: Let’s the number is x = 0x03abcd02, l = 12, r = 23, you have to check the number in the range from L to R ( Basically the bits from Range L to R will remain the same while other bits will be unset)
  • Output: abc (in hex). 
• Modification of the previous question. Instead of returning the number in the range. This time we will be given a range (l to r) and two numbers x and y. We need to change the bits of x from range l to r to make it y. So the bits representation of x from range l to r will be changed to the bit representation of y.
  • Example :- x = 0x03abcd02; l = 12; r = 23; y = 0xdef;
  • Output:-  0x03defd02 [ abc gets changed to def as it’s in the range L too R ]
• Then he asked me about the different types of storage classes in C. I told him about auto, register, static, and extern. Then he dived deep into the usage of these classes. He asked in detail about the difference between each of them and where in the memory they are stored.
• What are function pointers and their uses.
• Difference between array and LinkedList. Which one is preferred in which condition?
• How is stack implemented.
• Detail about the call stack during C program.

This round went on for around 2 Hours. Each question was followed by deep discussion. There were a lot of follow up questions. This round was mainly focussed on the knowledge of C. As I had good grip on C, I was able to answer all the questions. He seemed pretty satisfied.

A day later HR called me and told me that the feedback is positive for Round 1 and they will be moving to round 2. HR told me that Round 2 will be the last as the feedback for Round 1 was very positive so they are skipping one Round.

Round 2 ( F2F ): The interviewer asked for a brief introduction and jumped straight away to questions.

• Write a program to reverse a linked list. 
  • I had to write the List structure as well as the driver program. I wrote the structure, the print function, reverse function and the driver program. Then he asked me to run it. I was able to code and execute it. He gave few testcases all of them were running fine.
• He then shared a link to a C program and asked for the output. I took some time to think and, told him the output. He asked me to explain why will that output be coming. I explained to him the entire flow of code. He seemed happy with the explaination.
• Discussion on Endiannes of machine.
• What is Cache Coherence problem?
• Deep discussion on function call stack. How does a function know where to return after execution? What data is stored in the function stack.
• What is a Link Register?
• What is harvard cpu architecture? (I was not able to answer this one as it was not related to the software profile and I had very little knowledge of hardware.
• How is a negative integer stored in int datatype?
• How is a float number represented in float datatype? 

After these question, interviewer was done. I was able to answer all the question except for the Harvard cpu architecture question. He seemed pretty satisfied as I was able to answer almost all the questions. He dived deep into every question to make sure that my basic concepts are pretty clear.

RESULT: 2-3 Hours post this interview, I got a call from the HR saying that I have cleared my second round and they will be offering me the SDE 2 position. I can expect the offer in 2 days.

2 days later, I received the offer letter.

VERDICT : SELECTED