My interview experience for the Application Developer role at IBM with CTC of 4.5 LPA began with a notification from our college TPO, announcing that IBM would be hiring the 2025 batch. After applying, I received an online assessment (OA) invitation for the first round, which focused on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA). The OA consisted of one coding question on Dynamic Programming (Longest Common Subsequence), with a time limit of 40 minutes. I completed it in just 20 minutes and was subsequently shortlisted for the next round.

The second round was a communication skills assessment, which included sections like listening and speaking, correcting errors in sentences, and fill-in-the-blanks exercises. It was fairly straightforward, and a few days later, I was informed via email that I was shortlisted for the next stages, conducted offline at college.

On the day of the offline rounds, we were informed about an additional coding round held in the college lab. The IBM representatives shared a HackerRank link, and we were given a 30-minute medium-level coding question on Stacks. Following this, the shortlisted candidates moved on to an English writing round, where we had to answer behavioral questions within 20 minutes. Next, we proceeded to a Group Discussion (GD) round, where 15 students were grouped, and the topic assigned was "Benefits of AI in College Life." I was the first to speak, delivering a 5 – 7-minute contribution to the discussion. After 3 hours, the final shortlist for interviews was announced.

The interview was conducted the following day in offline mode. The interviewer was very approachable and began with a self-introduction. He reviewed my resume and asked project-based questions, focusing on my experience with React and API integrations. He delved deeper into how APIs work, requesting that I write code to fetch data using Axios. He also inquired about my open-source contributions, version control systems, and tools like Git and GitHub, along with hosting platforms. Moving to the DSA segment, the interviewer posed four coding questions, one after another. The first question was on Shortest Path using Dijkstra’s Algorithm, where I was asked to write its pseudocode. The second question required me to provide a full implementation of Merge Sort. Next, I was asked to implement a Fenwick Tree (also known as a Binary Indexed Tree). Finally, the last question was a simple problem on palindromic strings. Finally, he asked HR questions like "Why do you want to join IBM?" The interview concluded positively, the total time of interview was 1 hour 15 min but unfortunately, I was not selected.