Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Company placed: Walmart Labs, Bangalore
Job Position: Software Engineer – II
Job selection: There were a total of 4 rounds (Online Assessment, Technical Round – I, Technical Round – II, Project Manager / HR Round). In my opinion all the rounds were of medium difficulty at best.
- As long as you’re strong in both coding and theoretical knowledge (OS, DBMS, Computer Networks, Oops) you’ll ace the interview without any problem.
- If you’re looking for something that’ll give you an edge over others try to learn basics of system design and basic of software engineering. Also there’ll be questions related to the programming language you’ve chosen.
Round 1(Online Test): Time Duration: 1 hour
Level of difficulty: This level was Easy-Medium. We had 10 MCQs and 2 coding questions.**
Coding questions asked:
- First question was an easy question. Given two hexadecimal numbers ‘a’ and ‘b’, find the value of ‘a’ modulus ‘b’.Search modulus of two hexadecimal numbers in GeeksforGeeks.
- Second question was a medium one. Given a binary array ‘arr’ return the maximum number of consecutive 1‘s in the array if you can flip at most 1 0‘s. A modification of max-consecutive-ones-iii in leetcode.
Resources I referred to: To prepare for Online Assessment/ Coding round, I practiced solving problems in leetcode and GFG.
If any Mcqs asked: A total of 10 MCQs were asked and all of them were from OS, DBMS, Computer Networks, SQL, C++(Pointers concepts) and Oops.
Count of people shortlisted after this round: 25 out of 177 were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 2(Technical Round – I): Time Duration: 1 hour
Level of difficulty: Easy-Medium
Questions asked:
- Tell me about yourself
- What is your favorite subject? (Answered Computer networks was my favorite)
- What happens in the background after we type something in the search bar and the browser shows the result?
- Tell me about encryption and cryptography.
- Types of keys in DBMS
- Multi-threading in OS
- Critical Section in OS
- Abstraction and Encapsulation in Oops
- Coding Question – I: Three Sum in leetcode
- Coding Question – II: Third largest element (Third maximum number in leetcode)
- After this I was asked a general puzzle. Three bulbs and three switches. Refer puzzle 7 in GfG.
Count of people shortlisted after this round: 22 out of 25 were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 3(Technical Round – II): Time Duration: 45 mins
Level of difficulty: Medium
Questions asked:
- What is the difference between C and Java? (I told him about Object oriented programming and functional programming, Memory management and the pointers)
- He asked me questions about the pointers and how they are different in C and Java. (I tried answering to the best of my knowledge but couldn’t answer after a few questions on the same topic. Then he moved onto the next question)
- Asked me about how memory is allocated for objects (I explained him and told him about the string pool (for literals) and heap memory (for strings created using ‘new’ keyword) and how other objects are assigned memory as well)
- He asked me if I try to create a string of some value using the ‘new String()’ method and a string literal containing the same value is already present by creating the string using ‘String s = “value”;’ then would a second string be created or not.
- After this he proceeded to ask me about the data structures and collections in Java and how they are implemented. He asked me how hashmap is implemented. After I explained the hash function and all the features about the hashmap he told me to implement it(for the coding problem)
- I had some doubts, made some mistakes but he was helping me all the way. We discussed about different methods we could use and different ways to achieve the same thing. Overall it was a very good interview and it was like an friendly conversation after all.
- With this we had used up our interview time and he asked me if I had any questions for him. I asked him how I did and then about his day to day responsibilities in the company.
Count of people shortlisted after this round: 21 out of 22 were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 4(Project Manager/HR Round):
List of HR questions asked:
- Tell me about yourself
- What is your favorite subject and why? (I told her CN and the reason behind it. Then I told her about OS and the reason behind it too and that’s when the interviewer told me that her favorite subject is also OS)
- Of all the projects you did, was there any team project?
- Did you arrive at any roadblock while doing your project?
- How would you solve the problem between teammates when they don’t agree on something?
- How did you divide the responsibilities in the project and was everyone happy about it?
- I answered all of these questions with some experience from my own project.
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
- Why don’t you want to pursue higher education?
- Why Walmart?
- What domain would you be most comfortable to work in?
- After that she asked me if I had any questions for her. I repeated the same set of questions from the interviews before. She said that I did good. After that we were completed with the interviews and I was told to wait for further rounds (if there was any). Thankfully there was no other round.
14 out of 21 were selected for the FTE position.