Aricent Interview of Samarth Gupta

This year, students had a slight relaxation in the eligibility criterion; students with 59% were allowed to appear.

Round 1: Written

Duration: 1 hr 40 mts

No negative marking

Subround 1: Aptitude

30 questions, 30 minutes

Syllogism, data sufficiency etc. Easy questions.

Subround 2: Attention to the detail

20 questions, 20 minutes

How good are you at looking into the details.

·         3 words were given. Either all can be same, 2 of them can be same or all different. Mark options accordingly.

·         General Mathematical questions where operators (+,-,*,/) were replaced with each other

·         Picture matching

Easy questions.

Subround 3: Algo and DS

20 questions, 20 minutes

Questions based on Algo and DS. Easy ones, you just need to know basic algorithms and data structures, their pros and cons, running time of algorithms and operations on data structures.

Subround 4: Programming Concepts – Choice in between C, C++ and Java

30 questions, 40 minutes

You’ll be given a choice and you have to choose 1 in between C, C++ and Java.

Questions will be based upon your choice of language. I chose C. Easy ones. The mock placement tests helped a lot. Some questions were even repeated.

Critical Incident Form

This was to check how much capable a candidate is to work in a team environment, his leadership skills and how well he handles situations with resource constrains. Refer to Rajan Sir’s interview experience to get the details of questions.

Make sure that you write only the reality. You can be asked what you’ve written and if you cook some stories, you’ll be stuck up there.

Round 2: GD

9 students in each group. This was just to check the communication skills of the aspirant. If you were unable to come up with a view point, you were given a chance by the HR in the end to conclude the discussion.

We were asked to choose topic on our own. People in my group chose “Reservation for B.Sc. (H) Computer Science students in MCA”

Round 3: Personal Interviews

My interview started with Tell me something about yourself. As the interview was expected to be technical, I answered him accordingly. Then he moved to Critical Incident Form and asked me what I had written in 2 out of 7 questions. I told him, but missed a small detail in one of them. He asked me whether I missed something. Luckily I was able to recall.

Then he moved to Technical. Started with flip-flops, race condition, registers and counters. Then moved to C. Total number of data types and keywords in C.

Then he moved to networks. On which layer of OSI, does data translation take place? What is the difference between Telnet and SSH? Explain how a file is fetched from a unix server to a windows machine.

I told him that I am not much comfortable in Networks. Then he asked my fav subject. I replied C. He said that he doesn’t like C and asked any other fav subject. I replied DS and Algo. He told me that he’ll ask from networks only and continued with last question. Then he modified the previous question of file fetching that I had to fetch all the files having keyword ‘data’ in them. He wanted me to write a shell command, but I was able to explain the logic only and told him that I don’t remember syntax of sed and awk.

Next he moved to Software Engg. Types of testing, what all kinds of testing I’ve heard of, categorize them under black box and white box, explain each of them, SDLC, explain SDLC, name models, explain models. I told him that I don’t remember testing properly. Then he gave me a problem for average of 3 numbers and result was not allowed to be 0. I was asked to design test cases and he expected me to write them down in a proper manner.

All through, he tried to test my confidence by saying that I was telling wrong answers, he has studied something else and I am telling something else etc. etc.

I had marked development role on my form out of a choice between development and testing role. He asked me why development and why not testing. I was asked to convince him to put me in development and tried to convince me for testing side by side. I gave him reasons and he always replied he was not convinced. This conversation continued for about 20 minutes and in the end he said that he was still not convinced and asked me that since I was unable to convince him, should he mark 0 in communication skills column of the interview report. I replied politely that he can mark me on my performance. With this, ended my technical interview.

Soon I was called for HR interview. She started with “Tell me something about yourself”, then hobbies, interests, my fav interest. Since I answered music, she asked me what kind of music. I replied with my fav genre,  then she asked me artists. After this she asked me how did I manage daily up-down to home. She asked my why aricent, my dream company. I replied with Google. Then she asked why aricent then, why not Google directly. I replied that Aricent works in networking and I'll be able to improve my technical skills so that I can match the Google level. Next was my expectations from Aricent. Then I was asked if I wanted to ask some questions from Aricent. I asked a lot of questions regarding technology, current projects, work environment and cab.

That’s it. My interview lasted about 1.5 hrs including 15 minutes of HR interview.