Monday 17 November 2014

Hong Kong and Singapore Based Firm

Telephonic for a Singapore based firm with clients in Hong Kong.

Spring:

  1. What is AOP?
  2. What is DI?
  3. What is IOC?
  4. How many types of IOC?
  5. How to inject bean using constructor?
  6. How to inject bean using setter?
  7. How many types of beans?
  8. Life cycle of beans?
  9. Example of singleton bean?
  10. Is it thread safe?
  11. When does singleton get instantiated?
  12. When does prototype get instantiated?
Java:
  1. What is dynamic polymorphism?
  2. What is interface?
  3. Why use interface when we have abstract class?
  4. How to restrict a method from being overridden?
  5. Can private methods be overridden? 
  6. Can static methods be overridden?
  7. Can non-static content be referenced from a static method?
  8. What if system.exit() is called in a try block?
  9. StringBuilder vs StringBuffer?
  10. What is volatile keyword?

Amazon Interview

Amazon

Date: 15 November 2014
Venue : Nehru Place

Questions:

  1. Create a balanced Binary Search Tree from a sorted array.
  2. A 2-D matrix is filled with only zero and one. Each row is sorted i.e. each row has zero's on the left side and one's on the right side.Find the row with maximum number of one's.
  3. Create a NGE array for an array. NGE : Next Greater Element. For each element find the next larger element to the right. If there is no larger element to the right then show -1.
    Eg:
    An array : {5,1,23,4,7,5,88,2} will have a NGE : {23,23,88,7,88,-1,-1}.
    5    1    23  4  7    5    88   2
    23  23  88  7  88  88  -1  -1

Saturday 15 November 2014

Ebix Solutions

Ebix Solutions:

Venue : Located in the last corner of earth also know as Noida Phase 2.
Date: 14 November 2014 (Happy Children day.......beat that shit)

4 rounds in total.

Now before i start, some basic info about the company.
It is located in Noida Phase 2. This must explain the whole story to anybody in Delhi NCR. But if you don't get the gist, allow me. Ebix was no different. Just by the look of it you get a gut feel that something is very wrong. Its redder than a commie flag. The LED lights in pillars and walls and floor and in your face alternate between blue and red. The walls are chrome plated. Even the stairs have false lighting and you can bask in the glory of walking over DJ set while thinking of proper typecasting for your objects. It took me longer than expected but the Software Firm is literally established in a discotheque. However, if you are still reading then just for your acknowledgement, i haven't even started with the good part.

Reminds me of Ebix!!!

Round 1:
The very first round is an HR round. Surprise. Welcome to the Wonderful world of Noida Phase 2 firms. The HR discusses your salary, likes, dislikes, expectations, consummations and most important why you are planning to move over to Ebix (It appeared so innocent back then). Then she asks about your family and more about family and hometown of family and current lodging of family, until you start feeling uncomfortable. To my relief she was married, but you never know. And with the foreplay to set the mood right, she drops the bomb. WE CAN'T PAY. Plain and simple, that's what we do as a firm. We hire people to develop software, we organize walk-ins, discuss everything inside out and then we just don't pay. Can it be more obvious. Now a bewildered me mumbled something of the likes, "Then?!". Here's the explanation that can put Einstein to shame:
"See. We will pay what your are getting in your current firm. Only we will not provide you with any insurance (medical or otherwise), bonus, allowance or other perks. So, we will simply convert your current salary to your in-hand salary. Cool isn't it .And while your current firm provides you stupid cab facility like picking you from home and dropping you to office, we keep our buses at major metro stations that will ferry you to this awesome desolate location. Of course you can teleport to the metro stations from your home."

Then i have to wait for about 2 hours before anything happened. You can do wonderful activities in this time like, twist on the sofa, overhear the girly discussion on why Gauhar's sister is a weak contestant in Big Boss and how Bihar is going to be the next IT hub. Still, this was the most fruitful part of the entire interview process. The hot chocolates of the day (read guys who were sent back after interview rounds) ensured that their enlightenment provides them with enough chances to flirt with the girls who were more than eager to trade any inhibitions for that sort of knowledge. Some insight in their gyan:

  1. They will hire only if you know what's the difference between Spring 2.5 and Spring 3.0. Coz, that's what clients ask, isn't it. Why would they develop a checkout mechanism or product detail page. All they wanna know is the DIFFERENCE between Spring versions.
  2. You have to know Spring, Struts and Hibernate.
  3. They have a project that will end on specific deadline so ARE YOU prepared to go for it?
Then he bragged about his duels with his managers while flashing a cell phone with a screen the size of your television. In my view he was the only winner of the day and with that sort of attention he is getting laid sooner than his next technical round.

Round 2:
An interviewer who is tired beyond grief, finally calls me in for the first technical round. Asks a lot about resume, current project, etc. Dialogues from first round help a lot to clear this one. Then he jolts down some technologies on which he has not worked yet and gets really curious over them. Who was interviewing whom, again!!!. 4 hours after arriving and shitload of discussion later i am finally confronted with the first Java question:

  1. A simple scenario where a job inside a method can be hit by two or more processes. Just to make it cheesy he said that the job has serialization implemented on it. Actually, it was a classic case of a situation where threading must have been implemented. Theses processes should have Thread or Runnable implemented and the job must be inside a synchronized block. As, this was not the case in current code, we have to do it manually. So, use a semaphore/mutex and do the entire code for threading yourself.
  2. A is the parent of B and both of them have a method foo().
    public class Parent {
    public void foo()
    {
    System.out.println("Parent");
    }

    }

    public class Child extends Parent {

    public void foo()
    {
    System.out.println("Child");
    }

    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
    Parent p = new Child();
    p.foo();

    }

    Now, a reference of Parent is assigned to an object of Child. What will get printed on calling foo().
    Ans. Child

    Then, he removes the foo() method from Parent class.

    public class Parent {

    }

    Now, what will be printed?
    Ans. Nothing. It will  not even compile and give an exception regarding unidentified method.
After, round 2 i was made to sit outside again. Only this time an HR cum peon got really excited and kept saying after every 5 minutes that i will have the next round after 10 minutes. Needless to say i have to wait for full 1 hour again before the next guy bothered.

Round 3:

An even tiresome interviewer finally takes me to a glass chamber and asks the core question on which this company was established. Yes, you guessed it right. Family, that's what hey wanna know. By now, Ebix guys knew more about my family than i do. After getting his fix, he moved to Java. And then he asked me the exact same inheritance question that i was asked in the previous round. On protest, he started blushing. Don't you dare ask me why? It's perfectly natural and Noida Phase 2 rocks. The next 5 minutes were spent discussing who took my previous interview and his relation with that guy. However, this gave me a very very interesting idea.

**Did you realize that of all the stuff that happened this guy never. Never ever, bothered to get an answer. Now how cool is that!!! This can be used as a trick in future interviews. So, instead of whining and shitting your pants on that nightmarish question you just have to say that it was asked in the previous round. Even if the interviewer calls your bluff you just have to answer the question, which you have to answer any way. BINGO!!!

Finally, he comes to the point and openly confessed that they are simply looking for anyone who know Hibernate and Struts as well. I didn't. Still i was instructed to wait for the 4th round.

Round 4 (Final Round):
Enter the big boys. By look and accent you can tell that they were the actual players. As for the questions you must have an idea by now. "Yes sir, i live with my family in .....". And on it goes. More about myself and then they repeat the first round all over. The first guy finally satisfied after quenching his thirst for the details of my family, invites the other big boy for his fair share of dope. You could have actually skipped the whole article, (but its too late, isn't it), to read this part which explains what the actual deal is. Dude number 2:

  1. You comfortable working late hours?
  2. How will you get to this location. Do you own a vehicle?
  3. We work on weekends more that often. Cool?
  4. What exactly do you do? Question of the day.
  5. How long will it take you to learn Spring and Hibernate?
  6. Why do you wanna switch?
  7. What do you know about XSLT?
  8. What do you know about DOM and SAX?
  9. More and more technical acronyms were bombarded, before he declared that they won't pay a dime above my current salary.
Did you notice that all these questions don't have an answer. Its because i dint give any, nor did he expect any. Any effort on the contrary was immediately stalled by asking the next question. Then it got over and i thanked GOD more than once.
Free from any further torment, i ate the omlette at the dhaba cum canteen (which was exceptionally clean with the only catch of being right next to a fuming generator), had a real good look at this wonderful creation of Almighty called Noida Phase 2 and decided to leave. What had started in the middle of the day ended late at night. But i am really glad that it got over. As usual i got ripped by the autowallah into paying 100 bucks for reaching sector 37. 
All in all, Ebix is a software company and they are hiring and GOD is great.

Noida Phase 2

Noida Phase 2 is a shithole in a larger shithole called Noida. Actually Noida is not even a real place. Its just an acronym for "North Okhla Industrial Development Area". There are no railway stations, airports or decent localities. However, what makes it very real is the crime that's increasing exponentially. And as if this was not enough they came up with a novel concept. One fine day the government guys bored with years of tea and politics came up with a brilliant idea. Yo Dawg. Lets make a Noida within Noida so you can do crime while you do crime.
Yo Dawg!!!

 And then there was light. Apart from the fact that there are no means to reach there and your mobile phone will stop receiving any signal, they have started charging 10 bucks for even entering the God forsaken place. Needless to stay it gets even better as night approaches. But the best part of Noida Phase 2 are the companies that dwell there. Last time when i visited one i have to go through a warehouse cross a beaten track to reach another warehouse which bravely displayed the company logo. On asking the guard about the whereabouts of the firm i had my 'Alice in Wonderland' moment. He stooped, literally, pulled a few levers and lifted a shutter to reveal an entire company inside. Lo and behold. Next time i went for walk-in a company which was virtually established in a disco.
What adventures await when i will visit it next time is stuff for nightmares.

Thursday 13 November 2014

Deloitte interview

Just had a telephonic interview with Deloitte. And Deloitte exploited Hybris real bad.

Hybris Questions:

  1. Lots of question about items.xml.
  2. Difference between Collection and relation?
  3. Dynamic attribute in an item type.
  4. How to declare an item?
  5. How to extend an item?
  6. Structure of items.xml.
  7. Various tags in items.xml.
  8. Difference between type and item.
  9. How to ensure that some particular attribute is not added to DB through persistence. Something to do with dynamic attribute.
  10. Catalog vs Catalog version?
  11. How many active catalogs are there?
  12. How to make more than one active catalog?
  13. Architecture of cockpit.
  14. What are interceptor? 
  15. How many types of interceptor?
  16. What is modelcontext?
  17. Difference between save() and saveall() in modelservice.
  18. Entire hierarchy of catalog. Whatever that means!
  19. Relation between cronjob and trigger.
  20. Flexiquery.getbyexample() or something like that.
  21. Impex structure.
  22. Lazy loading in hybris.
  23. Price Groups in Hybris
  24. What if the delimiter in impex file i.e.semicolon(;) is changed to something else. How can this be done? 
Then it was plain ol' Java stuff. Its remarkable how the java questions were so easy while Hybris ones were tougher beyond recognition.
  1. What is dynamic polymorphism, with examples.
  2. Difference between final, finalize and finally.
  3. Daemon threads
  4. Difference between ArrayList and LinkList.
  5. Difference between Set and HashSet.
  6. Objects in a JSP.
  7. Life-cycle of JSP.
  8. Tag files.
Now, all this and more was bombarded within 15 minutes. And my eager interviewer was asking the next question before i can answer the previous one.
Gotta say i feel quite drenched. Need a chilled cold coffee, though a nice fuck wont hurt either!!!!

Interview dare of the century

Tomorrow i will attempt the interview dare of this century. Okay, maybe that's exaggerated a bit, but I will be attending three interviews back to back on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. All of them in very well reputed firms. The catch is that i am not intending to join any of them.

  1. Ebix solutions: Or should i say, some Ebix Solutions. Must be a small firm with couple of employees and even lesser projects running on support. As usual, they will ask the finest of the finest details of Java and J2EE. Stuff that you never use in development, with the sole purpose of proving that interviewer is the most awesome dude in documented universe. The interview is scheduled from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. I am planning to visit around 3:00 pm. The location is some God-forsaken place in Noida extension.
  2. Amazon: Here it gets interesting. Its AMAZON guys. Yes, that one firm for which honest, good to earth engineers will slit throats and dance nude. Its simply the best that India has to offer, apart from Microsft, Google, Adobe, Google and Facebook. And if you clear this one then you are licensed to get selected in all of them. However, its not exactly an easy-peesy task. Amazon (and the likes) are obsessed with algorithms and data structures beyond your wildest imaginations. They want you to create a double link list out of a red-brown tree that satisfies AVL by using stacks that are implemented through queues for a data that is arranged in a sparse matrix in O(1). Yes O(1), O(n) is not enough O(log n) is not enough and even though the question might ask you to sort entire libraries the answer HAS to be in O(1). Still, there are tips and tricks. Decent amount of time on GeeksForGeeks and similar websites can provide you with some ammo. How lethal it is can only be confirmed in the interview. By the way, how do i know all this? Well, because i have attended the interview before as well. Though i have told the HR that i have never been through one. This interview is on Saturday in some 5-star hotel. Sounds promising.
  3. HCL: Good old HCL. The Flying Dutchman must always have a captain. Any job seeker must always go to HCL. I already have an entire post on my previous experience. What happens on coming Sunday, must not be very different. Again, i lied to the HR guy about never attending an interview there.
All in all, its gonna be hectic as hell. I can only wish that they are not releasing any must-watch movie this weekend and i am really glad about catching 'Interstellar' last week. Also, pardon me for any silly mistake in the article. The bloke sitting in front is watching a scantily clad Gauhar Khan and it isn't exactly serving as a booster to my concentration. And, they say i am the only one does not do any work in the company. Anyway guys keep watching this space for more. Long live interview tourism.

Monday 4 August 2014

HCL Interview Walk In

Date : 26 July 2014
Venue : HCL TECHNOLOGIES, SEC-125, MAPLE TOWER, NOIDA.
             It's right behind Amity University. Hire an auto from Sec-37 or get one from Kalindi Kunj (if you are coming from Delhi). It's strange how both of them charge you the same amount.

Pre-Interview:
    The event being a walk-in, was swarmed by job seekers from nook and corners of Delhi-NCR. A long line awaited entry in the much-desired HCL building. The guard provides an entry slip (make sure to keep it carefully). You will be asked to return it on exit. Also, an id for verification would be required (PAN, Passport, Voter ID or Driver Licence). Its pathetic how grown ass bastards (mostly girls), don't bring an i-card and start whining before the guard. Bhaiyaaaaa...plzzzzzzz......Also, they will keep your bags before they move you for interview. So, make sure that you do not bring anything valuable. Then i was moved for the interview. And this is where i got judgmental. The seating arrangement was made in the basement cafeteria which boasted of an abominable stink. With the HR, busy, having her larger than life phone call, petty issues like collecting resumes, sorting them and then calling the candidates for interview were left to the guards. They created two groups according to the experience level, candidates with 3+ years of experience and candidates with less than 3 years of experience. Finally the concerned HR guy showed up. Took a few resumes and called the guys to first floor. Here, i was asked to wait for some time. This hall however did appear to be the waiting room of India's premier IT firm. Much to my relief. There were sofas, paintings and a terrace garden. Really what were they thinking when they zeroed in on the basement. Also, a few HR's were also running around looking busy. I had expected a long wait before my name is called upon as the hall was jam packed. Instead i was called pretty early. 

Round I:

No conference room again. I was simply sent to some guys desk. 
Q.1 Comparator vs Comparable?
Q.2 What are Collections?
Q.3 How many objects are there in a JSP?
Ans. 9
Overview: I totally failed to get this one. While i replied with session, application and config, i failed to put down the entire list. JSP also has a special object by the name of pageContext. The interviewer was pretty satisfied though. 
 This was followed by basic discussion of who i am and what i do (in corporate sense). All through the interview i observed a sulking demeanor in my esteemed interviewers attitude. Clearly, he did not like his job. Then he got personal and started asking why i want to switch and why i want to switch to a firm like HCL (no positive vibe was observed in his statement). Then came the grand confession. He was a former employee in my current firm. And though he moved to HCL he does acknowledges that HCL does not pay very well. To my horror he straightaway jumped to the discussion regarding package. I was expecting a package of 7, (my current package being 4.5). And for some strange reason i got real comfortable around him. Now i realize how funny it was, but right there i lifted my leg and crossed it over the other while sulking back in the chair. The guy did give me a disapproving nod but i just did not cared. Getting even more candid he came to the point. HCL does not gives 7 to a guy with less than 3 years of experience. At max i can get 6 but that's it and even that's highly unlikely. Then he took his feedback form. Wrote my skills over there and randomly scored me 2 and 2.5 in all of them. The marking was perhaps on a scale of 5.

Round II:

Finally some professionalism and a conference room.