Ground Up Pune Interview Questions and Answers

Round: HR Interview
Experience: The HR lady had my CV with her and she asked all these questions. Then, she asked me to wait for the technical interview in the lobby.
Tips: Prepare these questions in advance. Be confident

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: This interview was conducted by the operations manager. He also asked my expectations from the company, financially and otherwise, and also a few questions related to the previous work experience.
Tips: Prepare the technical part strongly. If you don't know the answer, don't guess. Be honest.

Round: Test
Experience: Technical part had MCQs only while grammar part also had a few descriptive questions
Tips: Prepare well. Don't worry, even the company doesn't take this test very seriously. So, you can use your phone during the test to check answers online.
Duration: 1 hour
Total Questions: 40

Round: Typing test
Experience: Duration 2 minutes. Accuracy to be maintained 90% or more. Speed to be maintained 35 words per minute.
Tips: Practice in advance. Just focus on accuracy, maintaing speed is easy. They allow multiple attempts until you clear this, so, don't worry.

Skills: Communication And Confidence, Stability, Patience

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: after uploading i got a call within a week
Tips: objective should be clear and crisp. Education Qualification should be presented in a tabular form, work experience, project details and and achievements should be given from most recent to least recent


Round: Technical + HR Interview
Experience: interview was very relaxed. there were 2 people on the panel. both asked questions and it was not a stress interview, i was given time to answer each question
Tips: confidence is the key, answer should not be long essay type, important to focus on basics

College Name: Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies

Round: Group Discussion
Experience: 1) BBG shipping has experience of turning around two companies and is one of the largest companies in this segement



2) City shipping is largest private company into ship repair and ship breaking but not in similar segment.



3) Sonyo shipping is one of the oldest shipping company and has various businesses related this. It is looking forward to expand in china and India and looking forward to expand and acquire some ship breaking company to create a low cost base.



Bids are:



BBG: 100% of debt for seven years 9% interest pa



City: 90% of debt for seven years 10% interest pa



Sonyo: 85% of debt for five years 13% interest pa



As a manager you have to take decision. Your senior has called up to look for bid of City and this will help to build relationship with city. The bank already has relationship with BBG. What will you recommend?

Round: HR Interview
Experience: I can’t say I was 100% right in all my answers but I tried to simplify every answer. I knew my CV very well and was able to anticipate questions like why less marks.

General Tips: Through knowledge of sectors and other fin subjects. Was confident as I had prepared well for the interview. In GD one has to contribute 2-3 good points that was sufficient. There were people who remained silent but contributed even 1 good point were selected for interview atleast. In interview they gauge your fitment wrt role and their core values.
Skills: Economics, Finance
College Name: NA

Round: Test
Experience: The online test was of an average difficulty level. There was sufficient time to complete all the questions on time. and there was a negative marking of 0.25.
Tips: One should be thorough with the basics of english, and quantitative ability. Reasoning section needed a lot of practice so as to save time.
Duration: 60 minutes
Total Questions: 50

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: I had a very good experience answering the aforementioned questions as i was confident in all my answers. i did not have a thorough knowledge of c language, So i told the interviewer that i am not adept with programming but i can still try. Hence the interviewer told me that even if i go wrong in programming, he won't be marking me on that basis.
Tips: Always speak the truth whether you know a particular subject or not. This helps the interviewer form an overall idea about you.Put forward your views in a soft and gentle but assertive tone.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: The HR round of interviews was a more general round concerned in knowing the candidate as a person, irrespective of his/ her merits and achievements. It focussed on forming an idea about our personality as an individual
Tips: Be calm, composed and patient in front of the interviewer.

General Tips: One should not be scared or nervous about placements. Patience and confidence should be maintained throughout the recruitment process. Practice placement papers from various websites and also keep yourself updated with current affairs.
Skill Tips: A lot of practice is required to gain speed in doing calculations.
Skills: Speed, Knowledge , Communication Skills
College Name: SRM UNIVERSITY
Motivation: The main motivation for applying to iGATE was the company is a major IT service provider and had been listed in the 100 fastest growing companies by Fortune magazine. Since i had been rejected in companies like Wipro, CTS, Infosys, i applied to this company in the hope of getting selected. Other motivations were my college seniors and teachers.
Funny Moments: When the technical interviewer asked me to explain any topic from my area of interest, I was shocked for a minute because i could not believe that i had been granted so much liberty of choosing any topic from my subject.To crosscheck what i had hear was true or not, i reassured myself by asking him whether he was sure or not. Then the interviewer smiled and told me to proceed.

Round: Test
Experience: 1 Written Test - (20 MCQ + 2 Coding Questions) on HackerRankAmazon visited our Campus on 28th July. In the morning the recruitment process started with the Written Test. It was taken on Hacker Rank which comprised of 20 MCQ Questions followed by 2 Programming Questions. MCQ Questions usually contain questions on C, DBMS, OS, and 4-5 Logical Questions. One should be aware that the Hacker Rank platform keeps record of how much time you have spent on each Question and after spending so much time did you attempt it or not. The 2 Coding Problems were quite easy. Only speed and accuracy was required to crack this round.Written Round Coding Question -1) A Linked List was given and we had to swap the ith node with (n-i+1)th node.2)(given some intervals), merge the common Intervals.I coded both the problems and passed all the test cases of the first question and half of the test cases of the 2nd Question. By the evening the results of the written round were declared and the Interview Process started. I rushed to the Design Centre and while I was arranging my grade sheets and my resume , something totally unexpected happened. One of the Amazon Employees who was also an Alumni of MNIT Jaipur walked up to me and told me that I have done very well in the Written Test and I was ranked 2nd based on the Written Test. He wished me ‘Best of Luck’ and told me to calm down and give my best. Talking to him really motivated me a lot. At the same time I was shocked that he still remembered my name even after an year, as we had talked only for a couple of minutes during my Internship Process in Amazon in which I was among the last 3 Students who went to the final round but was not selected. Apart from the students shortlisted from the written test, Amazon also shortlists around 5-6 more candidates based on their CGPA and some other factors. But it should be noted that at any time during the Recruitment Process, Cumulative scores can be considered.
Tips: CGPA above 8 should definitely be maintained.
Total Questions: 22

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The Interview Process started with around 25 candidates. I was among the first few with whom the Interview had started which went on smoothly



Questions of Interview Round II –



1) A String was given with a lot of words in it and I had to reverse all the words
2) A String was given and I have to swap word by word from the  beginning to the end.
3) In question 2 when there are ‘n’ in the String whose position shouldn’t get affected during the swapping process
4) Continuation was when more than 1 ‘n’ occur together.



I was asked to code the above, and told them about the time and space complexities. Then he went through my resume and based on my projects he appreciated my interest in OS. and asked me a Question –


You have a large game and a small memory, so how will you play the game.
I told him the concept of Virtual Memory and how it makes it possible to run such a game. Then he asked me whether there is any limit or constraint on the size of the virtual memory. I explained to him if the amount of memory required at any particular moment of time to run the game, itself exceeds the available size in the RAM for the user, then we won’t be able to play. Then he asked “Suppose you have a 4 GB Ram then how much memory will be available to the user and what will happen to the other memory”. I explained that kernel occupies some memory and apart from that page tables and all are also stored in the memory. Then there were some discussions regarding my projects.
Tips: These is some Important stuff which one should not miss while preparing for the interviews :


Languages one should be knowing for Placements:
1) C : For most of the companies
2) C ++ - For Faster coding using Standard Template Libraries and for OOPS Concept3) Java – For some specific companies which are focused on Java


Operating System:
1) Galvin Text Book
2) Video Lectures by Prof. Kamakoti – IIT Bombay (Not available on NPTEL. You can get it from current student of IIT Bombay or take it from me. I have Video Lectures of 2013 Pass out Batch)
3) Good grasp on OS implementation on Linux and Pint OS.
4) Detail Knowledge of How Threading is implemented in JAVA


Computer Networks:
1) Video Lectures by Prof. Sujoy Ghosh – IIT Kharagpur (Available on NPTEL)
2) Good grasp on Linux Networking (Servers and Networking Commands)


DBMS :
1) SQL Queries.
2) Database Implementation in MY SQL (Using B trees)
3) Indexing and Hashing in DBMS
4) Drawbacks of SQL Database
5) No SQL Database – Graph and Document Type Database and how they solve the problems
6) Every minute detail of the Database you have created in your DBMS Project.


Data Structures and Algorithms:
1) Video Lectures on Data Structures by Prof Naveen Garg – IIT Delhi (Available on NPTEL)
2) Video Lectures on Data Structure and Algorithm by Prof. Charles Leiserson and Prof. Erik Demaine - MIT.
3) TextBook – “Data Structures and Algorithms made Easy” by Karumanchi
4) TextBook – “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann Founder and CEO, CareerCup.com
5) GeeksforGeeks6) Company Specific Preparation by Practicing Previous Interview Papers


Programming Practices:
1) Codechef or Any other Coding Website: Experience helps to increase your Programming Speed, definitely useful in qualifying Coding Round
2) Standard Template Library in C++ for faster Coding - Hacker Rank Tutorial


Other Stuff to Study:
1) Brain Teasers
2) Design Problems (asked by Companies like Adobe. Detailed Example in Karumanchi Textbook)
3) Logical And Aptitude Preparation – Arun Sharma TextBook
4) HR Interview preparation from Indiabix.com

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Around 17 students were shortlisted. The resumes of students and their academic projects were given importance while shortlisting for this round. It started at around 10PM.



Questions of Interview Round III –



1) There is a big file containing numbers and we have to sort all of them.



I mentioned the approach mentioned in GeeksforGeeks that for example the available RAM for this purpose is 100 MB. So we can break the File in chunks of 100 Mb and bring the chunks in Memory and first sort them individually. Then we can prepare a heap containing first elements from all chunks. And keep extracting min from heap and replace it by next smallest element of the chunk it belongs. Then he asked if the number of chunks being formed here are very large, that is the heap I am preparing won’t fit in 100MB, then what to do. I suggested some further modifications and finally he was satisfied with the solution.



2) How to implement word suggestions like that in Eclipse.



I explained that it can be done using Tree Data Structure or using some sort of multilevel hashing in combination with storing words in sorted form. He asked me time complexities and told me to think of further improvements. He wasn’t completely satisfied and moved onto the next question.



3) Given 2 integers a and b, the sequence which will be formed is a, b, a+b, a+2b….



i.e Current element = sum of the previous 2 elements.



So now given a number k, how to figure out if it lies in the sequence or not.



This Question is not as easy as it looks. Here a and b can be negative or positive so the Generated Sequence can contain all positive or all negative or alternate occurrence of positive and negative element in sequence. So till which point should we generate the sequence and decide that k can or cannot lie in the sequence. I wrote a code but he mentioned few test cases in which my code was failing. After a few modifications I was able to write a satisfactory code solving all the test cases.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: I answered both the questions and also mentioned  solution to kth largest if Deletion operation is also there and if it is not. Then he told me to write the code for Heapify Function. Again there were some discussion regarding my Projects.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Questions of Interview Round V -
This round started with a detailed discussion about my Summer Internship Project in Wooqer. After that I was asked to introduce myself. Then he asked me -

1) Given an Infix expression, how to evaluate its answer.

I was asked to write the code for it covering all the cases and I was given half an hour to do it. I wrote it in about 15-20 minutes. Interview of 4th Round got over by about 9 PM, and the results were declared by 11PM.
Tips: Amazon mostly focuses on – Tries, Big Data, Hashing, Strings. Apart from my general preparation for the Interview, I had gone through around 60 Amazon Interview Papers available on GeeksforGeeks, so I was totally aware of the kind of Questions I would be facing in the Interview, and prepared myself accordingly. In this year’s Amazon Interviews mostly the questions asked were not directly from GeeksforGeeks. And few questions which were picked directly from GeeksforGeeks, the solution they were expecting for it was better than that mentioned in GeekforGeeks. But to guess such a solution, one should surely be aware of all the existing solutions in GeeksforGeeks.

General Tips: Self Projects have a very high weight age in one's selection because this is one of the many things that distinguishes you from other candidates sitting in the Interview. It also shows your capabilities and your field of Interest. Also, Summer Internship surely matters a lot in Companies like Amazon. There was a very detail discussion of my Internship at Wooqer during the Interview Process at Amazon so be prepared.
College Name: NIT JAIPUR