Telstra Interview Experience for Associate Software Engineer | Virtual Hiring 2020

Branches Allowed: CS, IT, Electronics and Telecommunications, Electronics and MCA

College: VJTI, Mumbai

Date: September 4, 2020

Round 1(Online Test): The initial test was conducted on HireVue platform. This round asked a few details based on yourself, like CGPA, your location preference, Gender, etc. Post that there is an MCQ round. It had 30 questions in 30 minutes with topics ranging from Linked List, Trees, Heaps, Array list, DBMS, OS, Networking, and Code output prediction. Part 3 had two Coding questions. Each coding question has an individual time limit.  

Coding Questions: 

Asteroid Mining (25 minutes): There is a Mining bot that will be able to mine 1 gram of Asteroid or generate another bot, which can help in mining from the next day. So for the given weight of the asteroid find minimum days required to mine the entire Asteroid.

Input: 99
Output: 8
Input: 4
Output: 3

Remove Numbers from the Jumbled Strings: Given a string with numbers, and as an output, we have to give the numbers in ascending order.

Input: ofnnoieunre
Output: 149
Input: twofourthreeninezero
Output: 02349

Out of 159 students, 37 people were shortlisted for Round 2

Round 2 HR Interview(1 hour): They segregated you into groups of 5 is to 2. So the first 5 people went for Tech round and 2 for HR. Similar was carried out throughout for rest 37 students.

So according to this rule, my first round was HR.

Questions:

1. 3 favorite subjects from all the subjects. 
   • Why you love them?
   • How are they different from other subjects?
   • So are these subjects’ compulsory or you chose them
2. Any 1 subject you hated in college? 
   • Why did you hate it?
   • What you did to overcome it and achieve something in it?
3. Where are you based?
4. Favorite thing about Mumbai-1/2 sentences.
5. The thing you hate about Mumbai.
6. Tell me two instances where you felt proud of your college?
7. Tell me 2 achievements in VJTI?
8. Tell me one instance where you could not achieve anything you really wanted to achieve.
9. Discussion on 2 group projects: 
   • Explain your projects
   • What was your role
   • If you are team leaders in one of them then more 3-4 questions like how you manage a deadlock, pressure situations, or if someone isn’t working well.
10. 1 solo project- Explain the project.
11. Tell me a time where you’ve brainstormed an idea with someone and you did something useful.
12. One moment where hated VJTI.
13. Tell me one instance where you misjudged someone.

Out of 37 people, 25 were selected for the next round  

Round 3 Technical Interview(55 mins to 60 mins): Post this the groups were interchanged, and we were sent to Technical interview

1. Tell me something about yourself.
2. A basic discussion of different subjects which were listed in my resume eg: Computer Communication Networks, Data Compression, OS, DBMS, etc. (Study the basics of the subjects you mention in your resume, see the top 10-15 questions that could be asked in it)
3. 2 Python Codes are given and predict the output. 
   • One was based on default methods in a class and the second was based on the difference between / and //
4. Then questions were based on 2 internships I had mentioned in my resume. 
   • I asked what I had done in those 2 internships, the interviewer was very impressed with my work in my current internship, so he asked me many questions based on it. Those questions were asked in an intrigued manner.
5. Loop Detection and removal of the loop in the linked list.
6. Boundary traversal for a binary tree.
7. All projects on a resume were discussed, he was asking about everything in every project. 
   • What software did you use?
   • Why did you do this?
   • Explain the algorithm in short
   • Code some part of it for me- In Notepad or MS Word
   • If he feels that he can tell something that can improve your project, then those suggestions will be given at the end.
8. ML concepts like Adam’s optimization and batch normalization Along with naive Bayes explanation were asked because of ML in my resume.
9. 3 puzzles: Camel Race, 3-liter Jug, and 5-liter jug and find the bad apple create.
10. C++ real-life implementations.

Finally, any questions for me. Post these 21 people were selected for the managerial round  

Round 4 Managerial round(25 mins): Here the type of questions is on your luck. For some people this was an extension of the HR round, for some it was an extension of the Technical round but for me, it was a mixture of both.

1. Tell me something about yourself
2. What are your curricular interests?
3. Then a discussion based on 3 projects.
4. Then why you used this certain algorithm in the project- You should be able to explain the effectiveness of your algorithm over then algorithm they suggest. For eg: I was asked between MLP Regression and logistic regression.
5. What are your Non-curricular interests?
6. Discussion on football.
   • Favorite footballer
   • What skills of his attract you?
   • How do you try to implement these skills in your life?
   • Use of data analysis in football
   • We discussed 2-3 matches where some teams tactically out prepare the other team using data analysis.
7. Why are you learning ML?
8. According to your noncurricular interests a little discussion will take place, for me my interest was in Politics so we had an extensive (10-15 minutes) discussion on India, the USA, and Russia’s current political scenario.
9. Discussion of the Telecom sector in India.

Do you have any questions for me? Finally, 11 people were selected and I was one of them!!! Thank you Geeksforgeeks for helping me prepare for the interviews

All the best to everyone !!