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

Software Engineer

IBM
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2 rounds | 4 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 3 Months
Topics: Data Structures, OOPS, Design Pattern Java, Web Development, SQL
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Learn about all the data structures and practise codes on online platform
Tip 2 : Practise all the components on the current framework that you are working on

Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: 7 CGPA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Keep your resume in black and white format
Tip 2 : Make your resume not more than one page and highlight the links for all of your project

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Online Coding Interview
Duration45 minutes
Interview date23 Jul 2020
Coding problem2

Two Easy level coding questions were given

1. Reverse string Word Wise

Moderate
0/80
Asked in companies
IBMIONBirdEye

Reverse the given string word wise. That is, the last word in given string should come at 1st place, last second word at 2nd place and so on. Individual words should remain as it is.

Problem approach

Used the inbuilt split method in java that gives an array of the string values and then reversed the string.

Try solving now

2. Smallest Subarray With K Distinct Elements

Easy
20m average time
80% success
0/40
Asked in companies
IntuitUberGoldman Sachs

Given an array 'A' consisting of 'N' integers, find the smallest subarray of 'A' containing exactly 'K' distinct integers.

Note :
If more than one such contiguous subarrays exist, consider the subarray having the smallest leftmost index.

For example - if A is [1, 2, 2, 3, 1, 3 ] and k = 2 then the subarrays: [1,2], [2,3], [3,1], [1,3] are the smallest subarrays containing 2 distinct elements. In this case, we will consider the starting and ending index of subarray [1,2] i.e. 0 and 1.
Problem approach

The simplest approach in this problem is, try to generate all the subarrays and check for which subarray the size is k. 

Try solving now
02
Round
Easy
Face to Face
Duration30 minutes
Interview date2 Jul 2021
Coding problem2

It was a face to face interview, The interviewer asked one coding question, OOPS and on the frameworks that were written on my resume.

1. Most Frequent Word

Easy
0/40
Asked in companies
SalesforceIBMGoldman Sachs

You are given a paragraph that may have letters both in lowercase and uppercase, spaces, and punctuation. You have also given a list of banned words. Now your task is to find the most frequent word which is not in the list of banned words. There will always be a solution, and the solution will be unique.

While comparing words, you can ignore whether the letter is lowercase or uppercase. For example, ‘AsK’ and ‘aSK’ are the same. The words will always contain only alphabets or we can say words will be separated by spaces or punctuation. The answer will be in uppercase letters.

The words in the banned list will always be in upper letters and free from punctuation and spaces.

For example :

Paragraph = ‘It's a square SqUare. It's a FLAT flat.’ 
Banned =[FLAT, IT, S]. 
So we can see these words [IT, S, SQUARE, FLAT ]  are most frequent.
Now we will look at to banned list and we can see 3 of the words are banned.
So we have a unique answer SQUARE which has a frequency of 2 and not on the banned list.
Problem approach

A simple solution is to run two loops and count occurrences of every word. Time complexity of this solution is O(n * n * MAX_WORD_LEN).

Try solving now

2. OS Questions

  • What is RAID structure in OS? What are the different levels of RAID configuration?
  • What is GUI?
  • What is IPC? What are the different IPC mechanisms?
Problem approach

Tip 1 : Read Galvin for OS thoroughly

Tip 2 : Focus on CS core subjects

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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