Role: SDE (Software Development Engineer)
College: Not Specified (On-Campus Recruitment Drive)
Interview Date: September 2025
Interview Type: On-Campus, Full-Time
Result: Selected
Difficulty: Easy (Online Assessment), Not Specified (Interviews)
Rounds: 3 rounds
Topics Asked: Coding (Anagrams, Priority Queue, String Manipulation), Resume, C++, OOPS (Shallow/Deep Copy, Virtual Keyword, V-table, Runtime Polymorphism), OOAD (SOLID Principles), General (Learning New Technologies), Puzzles (Rope Burning, Cake Cutting, Fake Coin, URL Shortening), DBMS (Neo4j, MongoDB, MySQL)
Experience:
This is an on-campus recruitment drive experience for an SDE role at IBM India.
Online Assessment: The assessment was conducted virtually on HackerRank and consisted of two very easy coding questions. One was an anagram-based problem, and the other involved using a priority queue.
Technical Interview Round: This round was conducted in person.
- Resume: Questions included "What is RAG?" (likely related to their resume content).
- C++: Questions on "shallow copy and deep copy," "virtual" keyword, v-table, and what else is necessary for runtime polymorphism besides a virtual function.
- OOPS: General OOPS concepts.
- OOAD: Explained SOLID principles.
- Coding: Given a string like "abbcddeee", output "ab2cd2e3" (assuming similar characters are adjacent and order is maintained). Also, a question related to LeetCode 198 (House Robber, though the context implies a direct question, not just a reference).
- General: "Do you have any experience where you had to learn some new technology/tech stack within a limited time frame?"
- Puzzles: "Given a rope that burns out in 1 hour, how will you measure 45 min using it?" and "What is the minimum number of cuts required to cut a cake into 8 equal parts?" (Answer: 3).
After this round, the candidate was selected for the next round.
Managerial Interview Round: This second interview was also conducted in person.
- Puzzles: "Given 12 coins (11 real and 1 fake) with the fake coin weighing lesser than the real coins, what is the minimum number of times you have to weigh to find the fake coin?" (Answer: 3). "Given a very long URL, how will you provide a shortened URL to the customer that maps to the long URL?" (Expected Answer: Hash Table).
- DBMS: Questions on "What is your favorite subject?" (due to answering DBMS), "What DBMSes are you aware of?" (mentioning Neo4j, MongoDB, MySQL), and "What is the difference between Neo4j and MySQL and when will you use each of them?"