IBM interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview
SDE - Intern
IBM
2 rounds | 5 Coding
problems
Selected Interview preparation journey
Journey
"Patience" is the word that I always use to motivate myself. It is more than just a word. I started my coding Journey (cp + dsa) in the first semester itself but in the third semester i stopped as i was not getting that much interest. By the end of fourth semester, i realised that I need to be good at programming to be able to secure any internship. Again i started but this time just DSA. Day-by-Day, Question-by-Question, i started getting that kick and soon it turned out as one of habits. Around 250+ days of continuous coding on various platforms like leetcode, gfg, codestudio, I am here sharing my interview experience with you all.
Application story
It was an On-Campus Offer.
IBM was offering 6-months internship from June - December. There were two Rounds after the Resume Shortlisting Round. Both the rounds held over WebEx.
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I would say that the way I answered the questions really helped me clearing all the rounds. I was thinking out loud and this is one of the most important quality one should always carry for the interview rounds.
Preparation
Duration: 8 months
Topics: OOPS, Operating System, DBMS, Computer Network, Dynamic Programming, Graph, Trees
Tip 1 : Have Patience
Tip 2 : Make your fundamentals strong
Tip 3 : Practice varieties of problems as much as you can.
Tip 4 : Participate in various contests
Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: They didn't mention any criteria
Tip 1 : Have Couple of Projects
Tip 2 : Be confident about your project
Tip 3 : Highlight the tech stack used in your project.
Tip 4 : Keep your Resume classic and simple
Interview rounds
01
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration90 minutes
Interview date27 May 2022
Coding problem2
It happened during the day time. Interviewer was very helpful and kind. He started the interview with his introduction and then he asked me to give mine. Then he quickly switched to projects. He asked basic questions regarding the project that I had mentioned in my resume. After that he shifted to core fundamentals. Asked questions on OOPS, Operating System, DBMS and then he gave me a SQL query to write. In the end he gave me a problem to solve ( Longest Palindromic Substring -Leetcode Hard). I was able to solve this problem. I answered around 80-85% of the questions that he asked about fundamentals. I was thinking out loud so he was very kind to help me in between.
1. Longest Palindromic Substring
Moderate
20m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
You are given a string 'str' of length 'N'.
Your task is to return the longest palindromic substring. If there are multiple strings, return any.
A substring is a contiguous segment of a string.
For example :
str = "ababc"
The longest palindromic substring of "ababc" is "aba", since "aba" is a palindrome and it is the longest substring of length 3 which is a palindrome.
There is another palindromic substring of length 3 is "bab". Since starting index of "aba" is less than "bab", so "aba" is the answer.
2. SQL Question
Fetch Nth Highest Salary
Problem approach
SELECT DISTINCT( salary )
FROM employees Emp1
WHERE N = (SELECT Count(DISTINCT ( Emp2.salary ))
FROM employees Emp2
WHERE Emp2.salary >= Emp1.salary);
02
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration90 Minutes
Interview date6 Jun 2022
Coding problem3
It happened during the day time. Interviewers were very helpful and kind. They started the interview with their introduction and then asked me to give mine. Then one of them quickly switched to projects. She asked basic questions regarding the project that I had mentioned in my resume. After that she shifted to core fundamentals. Asked questions on OOPS, Operating System, DBMS. Focus was more on DBMS this time. Then the other interviewer started asking about cybersecurity related questions. I was able to answer most of them and i was clarifying all the doubts instantly that was coming in my mind.
1. DBMS Question
Explain different types of joins.
Problem approach
> INNER JOIN
> LEFT JOIN
> RIGHT JOIN
> FULL JOIN
2. DBMS Question
What is Normalization? Explain its advantages.
3. OOPS Question
The Four Pillars of Object-Oriented Programming.
Here's your problem of the day 
Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company
Skill covered: Programming
How do you remove whitespace from the start of a string?
Choose another skill to practice
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