Barclays Interview Experience for SDE (Experienced)

I was approached by a Barclay recruiter regarding the open position of Java Backend Engineer for the Pune location as I had applied to it through Barclays’s career portal and was having experience of 3+ years.

So there was a total of 3 rounds as given below:

First Round: It was a pure technical round. Questions were asked mostly on Core Java. I had asked below questions in the first round:

• Design patterns in Java and specifically been asked to write code of “Singleton design pattern”, and how we can break it and how to prevent it from breaking.
• Internal work on HashMap and a few questions on what are the modifications in the Java 8 version. Hashcode and Equals contract.
• Some simple coding problems like the Fibonacci series, and palindrome String.
• What is mutability and How to make a class Mutable?
• Collections framework & its advantages.
• Basic questions on OOPS concepts and simple questions around exception handling.

So, the first round went well and I was hoping to get called for the second round.

Second Round: It was a technical + managerial round. In this round questions were asked on ongoing projects + Advanced Java. I will highlight some questions here:

• Questions around Springboot annotations. So be prepared around that.
• How Spring works internally.
• What is RAML, and why do we use it?
• What is a JPA repository and how we have implemented it in our project?
• Questions around ongoing projects.

Third round: It was pure salary negotiation round and nothing much was asked. 

Tips:

• If you are applying for a backend engineer position, prepare core java thoroughly, mainly OOPS concepts, Collections framework, Multithreading, Exception Handling, and Java 8. That’s it. 
• Also, please be prepared for your ongoing projects in your current company.
• Don’t write anything in your resume you are not confident about. 
• Be thorough about your resume. Do not write anything which you have no knowledge about. 
• You will eventually get caught and it won’t make a good impression on you. 
• It’s ok to not know some of the questions they ask. 
• What they see is your effort on the problems, so after trying for a while, if you don’t know, just tell them honestly that you don’t know the answer. 

I hope my experiences help you to be prepared for your internship opportunities.

All the best!! Cheers!