IBM interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 1

IBM
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2 rounds | 4 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Journey
My journey started at my college when I first learned to code. From there onwards, I have done a lot of practice from leetcode to code studio. I have maintained a streak of doing at least 50 questions a week to maintain my accuracy.
Application story
I applied from the company website .
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I was rejected because I have some design projects in my resume, and some of them are well known in the open source community.
Preparation
Duration: 4 months
Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, OOPS, Dynamic Programming
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Practice popular questions from Arrays, Binary Trees, LinkedLists from CodeStudio's Interview Problems
Tip 2 : Make sure you are aware of calculating the time and space complexity for every problem you're coding.
Tip 3 : Prepare through Mock Interviews to practice explaining your approach while solving in an actual interview.

Application process
Where: Company Website
Eligibility: Above 7 CGPA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Describe best of your projects in minimum words. Don't forget to add buzz words like REST APIs/ DB Indexing/ Benchmarking etc if you worked on backend.
Tip 2 : Don't add school achievements like Olympiads or Class Topper in your resume.
Tip 3 : If you've some work experience, put it in a way ,you're marketing yourself. Add terms like 'Created/Owned the Project through entire SDLC'
Tip 4 : Make sure you mention how your work experience actually impacted the company. Or how your self project can be actually useful to end user.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration45 mins
Interview date29 Oct 2022
Coding problem2

1. Count nodes within K-distance

Hard
10m average time
90% success
0/120
Asked in companies
Expedia GroupMicrosoftAdobe

You are given a connected, undirected and acyclic graph with some of the nodes as marked and a positive number 'K'. You need to return the count of all such nodes which have a distance from all marked nodes less than 'K', which means every node whose distance from all marked nodes is less than 'K', should be counted in the result.

A graph is said to be connected if there is a path between every pair of vertex, i.e., from every vertex to any other vertex, there should be some path to traverse and acyclic means that the graph does not contain cycle and undirected means that the edge is bidirectional and one can move in both directions.

Example:

Marked Nodes are Circled with red colour.

Now consider this example of the graph. Here nodes 1,2, and 4 are marked, and let us take the value of K as 3, i.e., we have to find all the nodes at a distance less than 3 from all the marked nodes. We can see that nodes with index 5,9,8,2,0,7 have distances less than 3 from all marked nodes; therefore, the total count of nodes will be 6.
Problem approach

You are given a connected, undirected and acyclic graph with some of the nodes as marked and a positive number 'K'. You need to return the count of all such nodes which have a distance from all marked nodes less than 'K', which means every node whose distance from all marked nodes is less than 'K', should be counted in the result.
A graph is said to be connected if there is a path between every pair of vertex, i.e., from every vertex to any other vertex, there should be some path to traverse and acyclic means that the graph does not contain cycle and undirected means that the edge is bidirectional and one can move in both directions.

Try solving now

2. DBMS Question

Write a query that prints a list of employee names (i.e.: the name attribute) for employees in Employee having a salary greater than $2000 per month who have been employees for less than months. Sort your result by ascending employee_id.

Problem approach

Tip 1: Even though DS and Algo is the base for any tech interview, don't take lightly your core branch courses.
Tip 2: Do practice for SQL Queries.

02
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration45 mins
Interview date29 Oct 2022
Coding problem2

1. Largest subarray with equal number of 0s and 1s

Moderate
10m average time
85% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OraclePhonePeSAP Labs

You are given an array consisting of 0s and 1s. You need to find the length of the largest subarray with an equal number of 0s and 1s.

For example:

If the given array is: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1] The largest subarray would be: [0, 1, 0, 1] (last 4 elements) having length 4.
Problem approach

You are given an array consisting of 0s and 1s. You need to find the length of the largest subarray with an equal number of 0s and 1s.
For example:
If the given array is: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1] The largest subarray would be: [0, 1, 0, 1] (last 4 elements) having length 4.

Try solving now

2. OS Question

What is TLB? Why is it used? What are huge pages and their advantages? Which is accessed first TLB or cache? Can we access TLB and cache in parallel?

Problem approach

Huge pages are larger in size and require less number of TLB entries for the same amount of memory. This leads to larger virtual address space being cached and hence better performance. Out of TLB and cache, TLB is accessed first because virtual memory address must first be translated to the physical memory address and then this address is used to access data from the cache. TLB and cache can be accessed in parallel if the cache is flushed everytime TLB is flushed.

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

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