NetApp Interview Experience

I attended NetApp interview process as part of campus selection @ +IIT Madras. The process went for five rounds. One written, two technical, one managerial and one HR rounds. All interview rounds were conducted on Dec 3, 2014.


Written Round 

• NetApp has full objective paper as part of written test. It was an online test. It has negative marking as well; +1 for positive and -1 for negative answer.
• There was 4 sections and 10 questions in each section. The four sections in the written includes Quantitave aptitude, Data Structures and Algorithms, Operating System and Programming.

Technical Round 1

1.  Describe multi-threading and multi-processing?
2.  Given a shared variable, create a multi thread program that print the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,.. in the following scenarios. For Simplicity you can assume two threads.
• When there is no particular order of printing between the threads.
• When there is an order of printing between the threads(Threads has to take alternate turns for printing)
3. Given a dictionary of words and an input string, find the longest prefix of the string which is also a word in dictionary. (Discussed solution based on tries and suffix trees) http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/longest-prefix-matching-a-trie-based-solution-in-java/
   

Technical Round 2

1. What is the use of cache levels(L1, L2, L3 caches) and their sizes.
2. What will be stored in caches?
3. What you will do if you have to find a way to organise the cache block allocation in such a way that locality of reference can be maximized?
4. What happens when computer gets powered off? What is the content that needs to be stored on disk before it shut down completely? Is there any charge that CPU uses after power supply turned off and before it gets shut down completely?
5. What is an interrupt and its types?
6. Is there Any non-maskable interrupts? Any good example?
7. Sony says that their products are unbreakable even if you fell them from certain height. What do you think that how Sony engineers are detects and turn off all the activity and make it consitent before it touches ground. (It uses the device accelaration to detect and signals nonmaskable interrupt to CPU along the estimated time so that CPU completes the Disk block I/O to make it consistent.) 

Round 3

1. Interviewer asked me to describe each and every project on my resume?
2. What is the complex problem that you have ever solved?
3. What are your responsibilties as TA?

HR Round

1. Explain Yourself?
2. Why Should I hire you?
3. What are your strengths and area of improvements?
4. Any Other offers in hand? Any other HR rounds?
5. Any plans on further studies?
6. If you get both Citrix and NetApp, which one you will choose and why?
7. Discussion on compensation break downs.

As expected after HR round, I got offer from NetApp on the same day. But, I'm not accepted this offer as I had other offers from the companies VMware, Citrix.

Tips

• Having strong skills on system side courses will help alot. So strongly prepare all the system side courses such as OS, CN etc. 
• Like any other company, it demands Algorithmic basics too ;) 

All the Best :)


Good Luck ;)

Citrix Interview Experience

I had attended Citrix interview process as part of campus selection @ +IIT Madras. The process went for four rounds. One written, two technical and one HR rounds.


Written Round 

• Citrix had both objective and coding tests as part of written. Both were online tests and hosting platform is Hacker Earth.
• The Objective paper consists of 50 Questions in 60 mins. There were no separate sections in the paper but it includes concepts from Operating Systems, Aptitude, Computer Networks, Algorithms and Programming.
• The Coding paper consists of two questions on Hacker earth platform. We were given one hour to solve this. All the questions were moderate and can be solvable. All the people in test got the same questions to solve.
• One question was http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-number-of-islands/

Technical Round 1

1. Assume that your kernel has no capability to do memory management. In this case, how do you implement/organize the memory in case of both new and delete operators?
• Basically the interviewer was expecting me to discuss about the underlying kernel mechanisms for memory. So I started my answer with the free list management followed by variable partitioning approach and then heap management. In the above discussion I was talking about the pros and cons of the each method and our discussion went for 25 minutes long ;)
2. Add two numbers represented as linked lists and store the result in another list?? what are base cases?? http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sum-of-two-linked-lists/
3. What if there is a cycle in above linked lists. How did you find it?? how did you break that loop?    http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-a-c-function-to-detect-loop-in-a-linked-list/

Technical Round 2

1. How did you find whether the given tree is a binary search tree or not?  
2. I had a Concurrent Programming course project in my resume. It was about the implementation of concurrent BST based on logical ordering. After seeing this project, the interviewer was asking the following questions.
• Why Logical Ordering? what is the necessity?
• Why two orderings?(about implementation)
• Is there any other way of solving the same problem?
• What are its applications?
3. Given a database having cricketer's statistics. How will you design this database to make the search easier? Simple query is: given a cricketer name you should retrieve his statistics in the least possible time.
4. How do you modify your design to make the search more efficient for most popular 'K' cricketers in the world?

HR Round

1. Explain Yourself?
2. What do you know about Citrix?
3. Innovation in your life?? (I was talking about Citrix innovation in the above and hence this question ;) )
4. What is success for you? What is your definition?
5. What are your strengths and weakness? 
6. Which website you are following for learning verbal communication?(I mentioned the weakness as proper communication skills and hence this question :P )
7. Explain about your family background?
8. Describe the situations where you learned from your Senior and Junior?
9. HR explained about the Salary breakdown and company policies? also asked for location preference??
10. Asked for any other interviews in parallel? I had NetApp in parallel. So she was asking like, what you will do if you have both in-hand and why?

Tips

• Having strong skills on system side courses will help alot. So strongly prepare all the system side courses such as OS, CN etc. 
• Like any other company, it demands Algorithmic basics too ;) 
• Having a system related project will help in many ways(as much of interview will be centered around it).

All the Best :)


Good Luck ;)

My Placement Material @IIT-M Placement Drive

Programming Languages:

1. C :
   
   
   The C Programming Language by Brain W. Karnighan, Dennis M. Ritchie
   http://www.iups.org/media/meeting_minutes/C.pdf
   
   
   Test your C skills by Yashavanth kanethkar
   http://www.tutorial4us.com/Download/c/test-your-c-skill.pdf
   
   
   C concepts from geeksforgeeks (Highly Recommended)
   http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/c/
   
   
   
   
2. C++ :
   
   
   Thinking of C++(volume 1, 2 ) by Bruce Eckel
   http://iacs-courses.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs207/resources/TIC2Vone.pdf
   
   
   C++ concepts of geeksforgeeks (Recommended)
   http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/c-plus-plus/
   
   
   Test your C++ skills by Yashavanth kanethkar
   http://www.flipkart.com/test-your-c-skills-english-1st/p/itmeyf5syghrfahs
   
   
   
   
3. C++ STL:     http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/stl/

Data Structures:

• Data Structures questions of geeksforgeeks (Highly Recommended)           http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/data-structures/
• Data Structures and Algorithms made easy by Narasimha Karumanchi (Recommended for  Beginner)  http://www.flipkart.com/data-structures-algorithms-made-easy-structure-algorithmic- puzzles-english/p/itme39xfsfzhxgag

Algorithms:

• Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Coreman http://www.mif.vu.lt/~valdas/ALGORITMAI/LITERATURA/Cormen/Cormen.pdf
• Algorithmic questions of geeksforgeeks http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/fundamentals-of-algorithms/

Operating Systems:

• Galvin Slides http://codex.cs.yale.edu/avi/os-book/OS9/slide-dir/
• ACE GATE notes (Recommended)
• Operating Systems Concepts by Galvin (Highly Recommended for Beginner) 
  https://it325blog.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/operating-system-concepts-7-th-edition.pdf

Computer Networks:

• Computer Networks by Tanenbaum  http://cse.hcmut.edu.vn/~minhnguyen/NET/Computer%20Networks%20-%20A%20Tanenbaum%20-%205th%20edition.pdf
• ACE GATE notes (Recommended)

Aptitude:

• Quantitative Aptitude by R S Agarwal (Recommended)  http://bookzz.org/book/960921/298b6d/?_ir=1

Puzzles:

• Puzzles to Puzzle you by Shakunthala Devi  http://www.sbioak.org/hard%20puzzles/Puzzles%20to%20Puzzle%20You.pdf

MCQ's practice:

• geeksquiz (Highly Recommended for all technical sections)  http://geeksquiz.com/
• India Bix (only for aptitude)  http://www.indiabix.com/

Important Sites:

• Geeksforgeeks --> http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/
• Career Cup --> http://www.careercup.com/
• Geeksquiz --> http://geeksquiz.com/

Important Book for Coding Interview:

• Cracking the Coding interview by Gayle Laakmann   http://bookzz.org/dl/1196714/e22893

Important blogs:

• Amarnath IITD placement Experience http://amarnath-iitd-placement-experience.blogspot.in/p/placement-tips.html
• Get That Job at Google http://get-that-job-at-google.blogspot.in/p/useful-blogs.html

Programming Platforms:

• Hacker Rank --> https://www.hackerrank.com/ (Highly Recommended as many companies follows this for screening)
• Leetcode --> https://leetcode.com/
• Codechef --> http://www.codechef.com/
• Hacker Earth --> https://www.hackerearth.com/
• Spoj --> http://www.spoj.com/
• Top Coder --> http://www.topcoder.com/ (Recommended for masters in coding)