Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

Associate Software Engineer

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)

3 rounds | 5 Coding problems

Lakshay Tutlani

Experienced | Aug 2015

Selected

Interview preparation journey

Preparation

Duration: 2 months

Topics: Went through GeekforGeeks, completed problems on Hackerank, Completed problems on Leetcode, completed quizzes available online, completed the problems mentioned in previous year interview

Tip

Tip 1 : Don't stress too much, you can't finish all the problems
Tip 2 : Talk to the current members of that organization on Linkedin or any college alumni

Application process

Where: Campus

Eligibility: Above 75% aggregate

Resume tip

Tip 1 : Keep it one page
Tip 2 : Focus on your projects

Interview rounds

Round

Easy

Online Coding Interview

Duration60 minutes

Interview date4 Aug 2015

Coding problem1

It was an aptitude test with maths and English questions

1. Puzzle

Robin and Williams are playing a game. An unbiased coin is tossed repeatedly. Robin wins as soon as the sequence of tosses HHT appears. Williams wins as soon as the sequence of tosses HTH appears. The game ends when one of them wins. What are the probabilities of winning for each player?

Problem approach

Tip 1 : It was a probability question
Tip 2 : Brush up your math skills

Round

Easy

Face to Face

Duration60 minutes

Interview date5 Aug 2016

Coding problem2

It was a face to face interview with one of the TCS employees

1. DBMS and SQL

Explain the different types of joins? You are given an employee table, how will you determine the employee with top salary and providing a rank?

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Have a good grip on SQL
Tip 2 : Break problems in small components

2. Search in a Linked List

Easy

10m average time

90% success

0/40

Asked in companies

ONEPERCENT SOFTWARE (OPC) PRIVATE LIMITED

You are given a Singly Linked List of integers with a head pointer. Every node of the Linked List has a value written on it.

A sample Linked List:

Now you have been given an integer value, 'K'. Your task is to check whether a node with a value equal to 'K' exists in the given linked list. Return 1 if node exists else return 0.

Problem approach

I first gave them an algorithm on pen and paper. Then I wrote a class to implement a link list.

Try solving now

Round

Easy

Face to Face

Duration60 minutes

Interview date5 Aug 2016

Coding problem2

It was more like an HR+Tech round

1. Operating Systems

Please explain the different types of OS if you have worked on? Experience in shell? How will you find the top 10 rows in a file on Linux machine? Most of the questions were around it.

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Have knowledge of basic Linux commands
Tip 2 : Tell them if you don't know the answer

2. Search an Element in an Array

Easy

15m average time

80% success

0/40

Asked in companies

You have given a sorted array 'A' of 'N' integers.

Now, you are given 'Q' queries, and each query consists of a single integer 'X'. Your task is to check whether 'X' is present in array 'A' or not for each query. If 'X' exists in array 'A', you need to print 1 else print 0.

Note :

The given array is sorted in non-decreasing order.

Problem approach

Step 1 : Pen and paper approach. Explain the problem statement first and then give them an algo.
Step 2 : He asked me to implement linear search
Step 3 : Asked about the time complexity of both linear and binary

Try solving now