TI

Role: Software Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: Not Specified (around Sep 2024)

Interview Type: On-Campus, Full-Time

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Written - Moderate, Technical - Moderate, HR - Easy

Rounds: 3 rounds

Topics Asked: Technical MCQs, Aptitude, Endianness, Cache coherence, Cache invalidation, Memory alignment, C programming, `malloc`, `free`, Behavioral questions.

Experience:

The recruitment drive was on-campus.

Round 1: Written (Online Test on Hirepro)

This round consisted of 30 MCQs in 75 minutes: 10 Technical MCQs (45 mins) and 20 Aptitude MCQs (30 mins). Accuracy was important. Around 24 out of 250 students were shortlisted for the Software Engineer role.

Round 2: Technical Interview

The interviewer directly jumped into questions.

• Explain Endianness of a machine and write a C code to determine it.
• Given a 32-bit hexadecimal address, add code to the previous C program to know the content at that address.
• What is the cache coherence problem? Is your code prone to it? (Answer: Yes).
• Given an API, where can it be used to remove cache coherence from the code?
• What is cache invalidation? Given an API, use it in the code.
• What is memory alignment? Write a C function that takes `size` and `alignment` as arguments and returns a memory block of the given size with the given alignment (used `malloc` and modified it).
• Discussion on `free` system call and its usage in the code.

After 5 minutes, the candidate was informed they made it to the next round.

Round 3: HR Round

This round was described as super easy, with normal questions.

• Why Texas Instruments?
• How do you spend your free time?
• How did you make friends in online mode?

After 3 hours, the list of selected students was released. Only 2 out of 24 students were selected for the Software Engineer profile, and the candidate was one of them.