Education: B.Tech- Electronics and Communication Engineering (Tier-2 college)
Years of Experience: zero, Fresher.
Date of the Offer: 08-03-2021
Company: IBM- GTS labs
Title/Level: Software Engineer Fixed Term Hiring - 2 years , Probation for 2 years and then converted as FTE based on performance.
Location: Bangalore
CTC : 11 LPA
Joining bonus : 50k.

Four rounds in total.

Round-1 : This round was called cognify, which were basic puzzles to test knowledge on analytical and mathematical skills. Questions were pretty simply but had to solve under limited time.

Round-2 : Coding round. One LC-Simple , Two LC-Medium questions. Duration : 65min.

Question-1: Mathematical question.
Four input parameters: Barrel , Rupees , recycleReward, perksCost.
Two options:
->Recycle a barrel and get recycleReward amount of rupees
->Combine one barrel and perksCost amount to get a perk item.
Aim : To maximise the perk items one can buy.
Question-2: Dynamic Programming , similar to 63. Unique Paths II
Question-3: Recursion.
Given an undirected graph, aim was to find sum of ceil of square root of number of nodes in connected component of the graph.

Thanks to LeetCode, I was able to solve them within time passing 97% testcases.

Round-3: Techincal Interview.[ Virtual ]
Interviewer asked to introduce about myself and to explain my projects. Then few questions on them.

1. To add and delete nodes from a given index in Linked List.
   2.Explain OSI layers in networking.
   3.How a code gets executed in OS, ProcessControlBlock , types of schedulers and scheduling algorithms.

Round-4: Managerial round.
This was the last round and the interviewer was the person who gave PrePlacementTalk.
1.Interviewer asked to introduce about myself and indepth discussion about my projects.
2.I stressed that I was a problem solver , so interviewer asked puzzles like N-Queens , Tower of Hanoi and asked to explain there time/space complexities and pseudocode.

After five days results were anounced.

Tips :
1.Understand and do atleast one problem of LeetCode daily .
2.Solve leetcode daily challenge and try solving problems of similar topics . In Daily challenge, all the important topics will be covered.
3.Try doing weekly and biweekly challenge. It will hugely help to solve problems under pressure and time constraint.
4.See discussion of the problems , there we can find optimized solutions and with different approaches.
5.When the interviewer asks a question, instead of writing code directly first explain to interviewer what you understood and explain the algorithm. Always explain the brute force approach first and then explain the optimized approach only if asked.

Always smile in the face of adversity - Sumitro Djojohadikusumo and also keep a smiley face in front of interviewer.