Aricent Interview of Rajan Gupta

This year students with any ER were not supposed to sit.

Round 1 (Written Test)
Total duration – 1 hour and 40 minutes
Total sections – 4
Marking Scheme – No negative marking

Section one – 30 minutes, 30 Questions 

Syllogism, data sufficiency questions, deductive reasoning.(Very easy section. Basic Logical questions)
 

Section two – 20 minutes, 20 questions.

There were questions which required concentration and labour work rather than brain work. 

Analytical Reasoning Questions(Coding-Decoding, Series, Picture Matching, Blood Relations etc...).  In all, again a very easy section.

Section three – 20 minutes, 20 questions

Algorithms and data structures. The section was easy. To crack this section, you need to know the basics of all types of searching, sorting and data structures like link list, stack , queue and trees. Two searching were not the usual ones – spread sort and cocktail sort whose running time was being asked.

Concentrate on running time for all three cases for this section. Cormen chapter reading would get you through this section.

There are many links given on the net as well to prepare for this section. Here are they

http://technical-interview.com/DataStructures.aspx
http://technical-interview.com/Algorithms_Questions_1.aspx
http://data-structure-definition.blogspot.com/2009/09/data-structure-defination-part-1.html
http://kundansingh.com/interview/
http://www.careerride.com/Data-Structure-Interview-Questions.aspx
http://www.geekinterview.com/Interview-Questions/Programming/Alogirthms/page4
http://placementsindia.blogspot.com/2008/03/some-basic-questions-on-sorting-and.html
 

Section four – 30 questions, 30 minutes

Programming language Section. Choice between C, C++ or Java. 

Maximum students opted for C. Paper on C was tougher than the previous three sections. You should be thorough with the concepts of POINTERS and Strings. Go through Test your C and Pointers in C by Kanetkar. Most of the questions were based on the logic of questions and how the code is working. So you should be able to trace any given code. Check the exact no of times a loop is running. See the syntax carefully so as to eliminate a compile time error. The section will take time if you have not prepared well for C as you will have to think many times before opting the correct answer.

Most of the people cleared the written and it was time to fill the critical incident form.

CRITICAL INCIDENT FORM

It checks out the ability of a candidate to work in team, his leadership skills and ability to handle any situation with the given resources. The following questions were being asked to us –

1.) Describe a situation during your college days when you were involved in some group work & you had to do something to help meet the group objective/goals.

2.) Tell me something about a recent incident where you were involved in a task & you kept making efforts to learn whatever was needed to improve the performance and to achieve the desired results.

3.) Tell me about a recent situation when you faced a problem and you had to identify the issue & related information, analyze them and solve the problem.

4.) Describe a time when you were faced with a task about which you had no or very little info /knowledge, but were responsible to accomplish it.

5.) Describe a situation when you had to make others understand & comprehend some idea or a plan to which he/she didn’t have prior knowledge.

6.) Describe a situation when you faced opposing views to your some original plan of actions or when you were doing a task, some conditions changed forcing you to accommodate.

7.) Describe a situation when you had many tasks/projects due at the same time. What steps did you take to get them all done.

They want to know what steps you took to combat the situation and how you managed to get out of it. What was the final result. Make sure you give real life events and don’t try to make stories.

Examples: Sankalan, Graduation college fest, projects in department and various other events.

Note: It would be a good idea to prepare for this form a night before the Aricent day.

Round 2(GD)
8-10 students in each group. They were divided into 2 subgroups randomly. Scripts were given to all the members on the same topic. The only thing checked here is communication skills. Even if you don’t come up with any view point, you will be asked by the HR in the end to summarize the GD.
Topic given to us was – "Should Euthanasia(Mercykilling) be legalized?" & We had to speak in favor of it.

Round3(Personal interview)
My Interview experience was good. The interviewer was super cool person.

He straight away started with my resume and asked me about MATLAB which I had mentioned in languages known. I told him that I made my security projects in matlab due to many inbuilt functions on matrices.

Then he asked me about my projects. Since aricent is a networking based company, so to his delight, he found the trap in my resume – FTP implementation. He asked me what is it. I explained him the concept of File transfer

protocol and told him that its based on Berkley Socket Interface. So he asked me what it was and how it worked. Both client side and server side were discussed in detail. He asked me all the calls – Socket(), connect(), bind(), listen(), accept(). He told me about the data structures used in this project. How to connect two systems and about ports and ip addresses. He then asked me differences between TFTP and FTP. He again asked about the commands implemented in FTP and their logic. How packets are being transferred for a file.

Then he came to my Shell implementation. How it was done. I told him about internal commands like ls, change directory, etc and external commands like pipes, input output redirection and background processes. We had a discussion over their working. He wanted me to write code for LS command. I was shocked to hear this. It took almost 4 days to implement Ls command during project, and wanted me to write that within 3-4 minutes. I refused him politely saying that I don’t remember the exact flow of but I can tell you the concept. Then he asked me to write the pseudocode for Ls but again I was not sure. I asked him again to explain him verbally. So I did that only.

Then he asked me about fork() command. How can a process be created without using fork. What is exec(). How is it implemented. I was able to handle this part. He then asked, when a system starts in unix, what all steps takes place. I explained him the concept of Bootstrap loader program and the INIT process. He then asked me more details on it n wanted me too explain about a process X creating another process Y without using fork. What would happen and how it would happen?

He then asked me what is a pointer? What is the difference between a single pointer and a pointer to a pointer. I explained him diagrammatically showing the addresses and values. Then he asked me application of pointer to a pointer. I explained him about call by value funda of C and gave him example to pass a pointer to a pointer to head node of a list while performing any operation on a link list. He was not satisfies this answer. So explained him about an array holding pointers to strings. So to access those strings, pointer to pointer was required. He was happy as I explained him diagrammatically. He then asked me about a Queue. He asked me to write functions to perform addition and deletion in a queue through array. I started writing the code and in the meanwhile he was going through my critical incident form and resume.

Then I thought he would end this interview. But he asked me explain my code. And then discussed. How can it be changed. I was nervous while a writing a code for enqueue and dequeue.

Then he discussed about my research papers. I explained him about images. How they are stored. About pixel values. And then explained him about the algorithm that I had implemented on the images. Since mine was for lightweight devices, so we discussed on the usage of memory and speed. The discussion was long on research papers.

Then he said technical part is over. He told me after talking to me and going through my resume and critical incident form, its evident that I have always been associated with so many extra curricular activities and group management task. So he need to ask anything from my Critical incident form. But still he said what would you like to be, a team member or a team leader. I said its situation dependent. Then he said, explain a situation when you had to accommodate with the plan of others in your group. I explained him an incident from my graduation life. He was happy to hear that. It was the end and said do you want to anything. I asked him I hope it was fyn from my side. He said yeah. And said that your concepts and algo is good but coding requires more practice.

That’s it. My interview got over in 1.5 hours. (2.30pm – 4pm)

Note: It wasn’t a conventional interview with standard algo ds c/c++ os dbms networks questions being asked explicitly, But through projects in my resume he checked my concepts in all.