Wells Fargo came in for 2 profiles – one was Technology (SDE), and the other was for the Analyst role. One was allowed to apply for only one of the two, and I applied for an SDE role. This profile was of Program Associate – A and was open for all branches for CGPA 7 & above.
Round 0: Resume Shortlisting – Shortlisting was done and a total of 163 students were made to sit for the next round after screening. It is difficult to find the exact criteria of shortlisting but CGPA was one major factor.
Round 1: Online Test – Conducted on AMCAT platform with webcam, mic, and JavaScript enabled. Consisted of questions related to 3 sections –
- English – Fill in the blanks with appropriate words/phrases (12 questions in 15 mins)
- Business Understanding – Had questions based on quantitative aptitude, data interpretation based on different cases, etc. (15 questions in 25 mins)
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Code Aptitude – Programming questions (2 questions in 60 minutes) given to all students randomly from a larger pool. All languages were allowed. C++ was allowed till C++ 11 (features exclusive to C++14 and C++17 did not work). My questions were –
- Given a weighted undirected graph, two vertices source and destination are specified. There can be multiple paths between source and destination. There is a magician who can perform k magic tricks (k given) in which the trick involves reducing an edge weight to 0. With at most k magic tricks allowed, find the shortest path from source and destination.
- Given ‘n’ petrol pumps, along with n-dimensional arrays having a volume of petrol (vol[i]) and cost of petrol (cost[i]) of a particular petrol pump (i), and capacity of petrol tank of a car, c, find the least amount of money one must spend to fill the car to maximum possible value (<=c). One can either take full petrol from a petrol pump or not take it at all. There is no petrol that is spent from going from one petrol pump to another.
The time of one section was not transferrable to another.
Out of 163 students, 33 were shortlisted for the next round, i.e., technical interview.
Round 2: Technical Interview – Went for around 50 minutes on Zoom. The interviewers (4 in number) asked for a brief introduction involving technical expertise, along with project(s) explanation and experience of the most recent internship. After that, the interview started with an algorithmic problem –
- Given a string consisting of bracket characters involving [,{,(,<,>,),},], an expression from substring i to j is considered valid if it suffices two conditions – it opens and closes with a similar type of brackets at index i and j, and the expression from index i+1 to j-1 is also a valid expression. An empty expression is considered valid. Under these circumstances, find the total number of valid expressions in the given input, and display all such valid expressions. Example, input “[{}[]][()]{}” will have answer 6.
Expected time complexity – O(n). I was made to discuss the approach first, followed by coding it on the IDE of my choice and test on few test cases. Edge cases were explicitly discussed. It took 15 mins for me to do these three subtasks.
After this, the discussion moved back to resume. Two of my projects involved back-end development using Spring Boot, so a lot of discussions moved around that –
- Technical and implementation details of the projects.
- What underlying servers are supported by Spring Boot? Which one did you use? Why?
- What are the different layers of a Spring Boot Application?
- What advantages do you see of using Spring Boot over other back-end frameworks?
- How do you make an application’s code readable and maintainable?
- A client made a request to upload a file but did not receive a response for 3 mins, and he/she raised a query. How would you go about diagnosing the issue and then resolving it?
- How is data security taken care of in today’s applications, and what additional steps would you plan to take to avoid any security breach?
- What is the difference between SQL and NoSQL databases? Which one will you choose you to use under what scenario? Why?
- A brief discussion of the Software Development Lifecycle.
The interviewers were friendly and just did not listen to my answers but also gave their inputs. They wanted to proceed with my other projects, but time did not permit, so they closed the discussion with a couple of behavioral questions –
- Given your branch is electronics, how inclined are you to take up IT as your career?
- What are your plans for the future as far as your career is concerned?
11 out of 33 people were further shortlisted for the next round which was an HR interview.
Round 3: HR Interview – Short Discussion of 15 minutes involving questions like –
- Family background
- The educational journey of school and college
- The overall experience of the last internship done
- One weakness and how would you tackle it going forward.
The HR interview turned out to be non-eliminatory in nature. Finally, 10 students (including me) got the final offer for the SDE role (1 remaining was selected in a higher preference company on the same day).
The levels of coding problems were medium. In the online test, it is also important to focus on the MCQ sections, as they were the key factors since most of the people performed similarly in the coding bit. In the interviews, the focus was also to see whether you have a core understanding of technologies you have worked on. The company was not just focused on evaluating the academic grasp of CS fundamentals, but also a good hold on application-based technologies like ML, Development, version control, etc. The interviewers were friendly and pitched in with their opinion on certain answers that I gave, so, it was also a learning experience.