Infosys HackWithInfy Interview Experience

Hello guys!

I am Vamsi Varun. This post is about my HackwithInfy interview experience through which I got placed in Infosys. Hope it would be useful for you.

Recruitment Process:

"HackWithInfy is an extraordinary initiative for students to inculcate the culture of rapid problem-solving and innovative thinking from early on. The program not only provides the perfect stepping stone for students to explore their passion for programming but also an opportunity to compete and earn a chance to work with us."
This was the description given by Infosys while announcing HackWithInfy for the first time this year(2018).

I like problem-solving so I was keen to participate in that contest. It was hosted in Hackerrank that year. I took it more like a programming contest than a recruitment test. It was a 3 hrs contest in which 3 programming questions were given to solve. Everyone got their different set of questions. I've completed 2 questions quite easily and stuck with the last one which was partially accepted at the end.
As there were different sets, few got quite easy questions while a few got tough ones.
The questions were on arrays, hashing, backtracking, ad-hoc and on dynamic programming as well.
Finally, we got results in 2-3 weeks and I was shortlisted for the second round. There were people who completed all 3 but they were not shortlisted, donno why!!! They might have seen the penalties and time as well I guess!

Around 10 members got shortlisted in my college. The second round was a 2:30 hrs coding competition but a bit tougher this time. This also was also held in Hackerrank. The questions were on precomputation, greedy, DP, backtracking again. But this time they've given input differently.
The input is given in the text such that we have to parse it to get our original array. For example,  if 1 2 3 4 5 is the input, they've given it as a 1$2$3$4$5 such that we have to parse the string, remove $ in between and convert them into numbers before implementing our logic.

Clearly, those who do competitive programming regularly can only attempt those questions within the desired time. Those who do normal coding for college academics will stuck somewhere in between. Because in that 2:30hrs one should make sure there parsing logic works fine to get input, then go for main logic to solve the given problems which are on DP, backtracking and kind of little advanced concepts. It won't be that easy to manage time. Many people who don't practice programming daily will get stuck in parsing itself. But for competitive programmers, it would be very easy as they do face these things very often.

Coming to questions, again everyone got their own sets in which a few got an easy set and few got a tough one. I solved one question completely and the second one partially. Can't manage with the optimization they needed and also stuck with the datatype I've chosen. The question needed long double but I've taken it as double. Then it always shows wrong answer, my logic was fine and I don't know what's happening. I took a long time to debug. This is what happens when you focus more on logic but not on problem statement :P

After few days results were announced and 1009 members were advanced to the next level nationally which is a technical interview in a video conference. They haven't announced ranks but the top 300 members were invited to a hackathon at Pune campus. They will get a chance for the power programmer role in Infosys at 8LPA package. I was not in the top 300 members but got a mail inviting to the interview for System Engineer Specialist role for 5LPA at Infy. Three of my friends in college got those emails as well.
Finally, the day arrived. I read a few interview experiences at geeksforgeeks.org and went through the basics of every CS subject(DS, DBMS, OS, CN). I was quite confident that day. The interview started and he asked me to introduce myself as expected. The questions were like.....

Interviewer: Tell me about yourself.
Me: Said about my schooling, college-level achievements, projects etc,

Interviewer: Can you tell me why do you want a job???
(Thought he will go for technical. Never expected this question then!!! But somehow managed to answer.)
 Me: Everyone in this world needs to do some work to engage in their lives. Everyone wants to prove themselves in their field. For me it's CSE. I want a chance to prove myself in this IT field.

Interviewer: Well, Can you elaborate SDLC( Software Development Life Cycle) and explain its phases?
Me: (answered)

Interviewer: Is maintenance comes under development or its different??
Me: Depends on the client. If they want some new feature after deployment then development should be done! otherwise, both are different!

Interviewer: Write a program to find nth Fibonacci number and print only even Fibonacci numbers in between.
(After clearing two programming rounds, you might feel this as a dumb question!!! But it's not, because I felt that he doesn't want to check whether I can write a program for Fibonacci. But how optimized I can write the code covering all the edge cases, is the thing he wanted to check).

Me: Wrote the program using memoization, (not in the traditional method of taking three variables). So that we can do any operation we wanted up to nth number.

Interviewer: (seems impressed )

Then Interviewer asked a few questions about my projects and I answered all of them.

Interviewer: I think we are done with this!  Any questions?

Me:(quite surprised as he finished it so quickly but I wanted to ask some questions) Yes, Can I know what is the significance of my role System Engineer Specialist? And I want to know about training as well!

He explained to me about my role and its responsibilities. He said, "You have to write optimized code in very less amount of time."

I said that I've been doing that for the past 2 years as I do competitive programming quite frequently and the only optimized code works there.

Interviewer: Yeah, the code you wrote was good actually.
(I felt somewhat relaxed hearing this from him. )

Me:  Thank you.

Then we were done with the interview and after almost a month we got results and I was offered with SES  role at Infosys.

I've read about the SES profile through blogs, various experiences and other sources. This helped me a lot during my interview I feel. Whenever we are attending an Interview we should always have to do enough research on the company and your role for which they are going to interview you.

System Engineer Specialist(SES) is a new role created in Infosys for the first time and it is something different from normal System Engineer(SE) role which Infosys generally offers to campus recruits at 3.8 LPA package. For SE we just need to solve the problem but for SES we need to solve it in an optimal way. Tuning my mind that way helped me a lot getting through this interview.

When he asked about Fibonacci I have gone with an optimized solution rather than going for traditional 3 variables one. This is where he seems impressed throughout my interview.  This interview was important to me because I had no other offer which suits my profile at that time and I am happy as I cracked it :)

Good Bye for now and keep visiting my blog :)