VMWARE visited my college for campus hiring in October. The hiring process was 2 days long and approximately 400 students appeared in the online assessment. Hiring process was completely virtual from the comfort of home.
There are a total of 5 rounds including one online assessment and 4 interviews.
Online Test: It was a test on the hirepro.in platform which consisted of three sections.
- Aptitude and reasoning( 10 questions)
- Technical Questions (30 questions)
- One Coding Question (The problem was to convert a text into cipher text given some rules and a key)
Total 36 students cleared the technical online assessment and got an email for technical interview 1.
Technical Interview 1: All the interviews were on zoom call, I also got a hackerrank link for writing codes during the interview. The first technical interview started with my introduction. After that interviewer gave me one coding question which was
- Question: Given a level n, you have to find out the number of ways a person can reach that level by only taking one or two steps at a time. At first, I was stuck on this question, but the interviewer gave me one tip and I realized that I can solve this problem by using recursion. After taking some time I was able to make the program. Then the interviewer asked me about the time complexity of the program that I made.
- There were a lot of questions from DSA including binary trees and traversal techniques. At last, she asked me which data structure I would use to make a tree if I had given the preorder and postorder of that tree. Technical interview 1 was one hour long and around 25 students were able to make it to the second technical interview.
Technical Interview 2: There was a panel of two interviewers for this round. First, they gave me a coding question. I had to make a program to find out the minimum number of insertions to make a string palindrome. I was writing the full program but in between, they understood the concept I was trying to use and told me to move further.
- Then they asked some DSA questions and moved to my projects. I had a lot of cross-questioning on my project which was machine learning-based, they also asked me about the security, designing, and networking aspects of it. I got to know a lot of things during this process to make my project stronger. It was a very healthy discussion kind of interview.
- The second technical interview was also one hour long and 12 students were able to clear it and make it to the managerial round. Luckily I was among one of them.
Managerial round: This is the third interview round of VMWARE where you get to connect with the managers of the company and know about them. The managerial round was about 45 minutes long.
- First, I introduced myself and then the interviewer started asking about my internships, projects, and almost everything that I had written in my resume. The interviewer asked many basic questions on space optimization, memory management, processors, networking, and designing. I enjoyed this round a lot because It didn’t feel like an interview at all.
- The manager was very friendly and we had a healthy discussion on various other topics also, including my academic journey from childhood till graduation. I was very sure that my managerial round went very well and there are chances that I will get an email for the HR round. 6 students cleared the managerial round and got the mail for the HR round, which was the last round.
HR Round: I was very happy that I got mail for the HR round. This round was only 10 minutes long. I had a very nice conversation with the HR team about my family background and my academics.
- They also asked me about the core values of VMware and whether I want to study further or not. My internet went down for some time during the interview so I was also a little tense but overall it went well. HR told us that they will tell the results to the college and we will get to know about it from them.
- The next day I got to know that I got an internship+full-time offer from VMware. Overall 6 students were selected among them 3 got internship offers and 3 got internship+full time offers. This was the best thing that ever happened to me.
- After giving so many interviews I was finally able to crack the interview for VMware which was my dream company. It was a very exciting experience and I got to know a lot of things during the whole process.
Interview Tips
- Have a good grip in coding. Writing clean and organised code in front of the interviewer is also important. Even if you are not able to make full code try to write the parts you know, just don’t give up.
- Don’t get demotivated if you are not able to answer any question because It’s not the end, you need to focus on the next question. Interviewers do not always want the correct answer of everything; they just want to analyse your thought process and decision making.
- Keep the basics of your core subjects clear, especially DSA.
- You need to be polite but one should stick to their normal behaviour and accent.
- In VMWARE, most of the questions were based on tree, recursion and link list, so prepare these topics well.
- Having a deep understanding of your project can also impress the interviewer.