I recently gave the Ciena test for BPS delivery role On-Campus 6M + PPO, eventhough I had applied for C++ developer role, the company had sent me BPS delivery OA link which is a Java role.
OA
Contained MCQs of OS, OOPs and Aptitude questions. Fairly Easy.
Round 1
This round was a pen and paper DSA test, 3 questions in 40mins.
The questions were standard easy - medium level
- Coin Change
- Spiral traversal of a matrix
- Array traveral while finding the power of 2 <= than each element
Round 2
This is was the in person interview round. My interview was at the last, which I think hurt my chances.
My interviewer started by asking me about my projects, which one was I most familiar with, they started by asking me why I had built it, and asked me questions about authorization and authentication. Asked me whether I had done API versioning on my project, HTTP status code, client side response, server side response,how JWT tokens work.
Next they moved onto DSA and drew me a tree on paper and asked what's the DFS and BFS traversal of that tree, I wrote that but I don't if the interview misread it, they said I had written the DFS traversal wrong. They asked me which Data structures are used for DFS and BFS. They asked me if heap was implemented a tree with many nodes instead of a Binary Tree what would happen.
They then moved to OS, asked what's the difference between thread and process scheduling. They asked me to write code for thread and locks.
After that, they asked me how familiar I was with SQL. Since I hadn't practiced in months, I said not much. They then asked me about normalizaition and types of join but said that since I don't kn much, they won't ask me to write queries.
Then they moved on to C++ specific questions, what is dynamic cast, how would we detect memory leaks in a program in cpp, how would we process a binary file in cpp, how would we create a random number generator in cpp.
Some of these I knew but forgot due to pressure and some I didn't knew. I was rejected. The interview lasted around 1.5 Hrs.
I think since this was a java role and I had my interview at the last and they had already found the enough people to fill their roles, I was just used as a punching bag to let of some steam by the interviewer. They were very unsupportive, even when given correct answer would try to confuse, when I was not able to understand the question and tried repeating the question so that we were on the same page, they would ask me to stop, a lot times they'd ask me yes or no and I would try to reason while speaking, they'd say that they don't want to hear my logic rather just a yes or no.
Very bad interview, it made me wanna give up coding honestly :(
