When I thought interviews can not get worse, came the BigBinary hiring process. It’s hard for me to say this at the very start that lack of good preparation just added more fuel to the fire.

BigBinary was looking for a React developer with at least one year of professional experience. But duh… I am still a student. They offered an enormous package of 15–50 LPA! It was hard for me to just turn a blind eye to this offer. The worse that could happen was my application getting rejected.

“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes — then learn how to do it later”.

Looks like I got some fortune on my side too. Two weeks later, I got the call for the hiring process.

STAGE 1

I am not supposed to share the challenge as it is. So I would resort to the general idea.

I got a document with detailed information to create a production-ready website using React. The Figma design and the API documentation were of production quality. They expected me to follow all the good practices in code and GitHub to create a website of production quality and deploy it.

The thing I liked most was: “You will not get any extra points for solving the challenge fast. Speed of delivery is not what we are looking for in this challenge”. So, if I did not know something, I had all the time to learn it instead of creating a spaghetti code using StackOverflow.

I had to wait for the semester exams to get over before working on the challenge. I had to put in several hours each day to make sure that everything was perfect. I used React-Typescript, Material-UI, Bootstrap, Redux, Docker, and CircleCI, deployed it in both Heroku and GitHub pages. Once complete, I was already calling myself an expert. Well, I was competing against professionals. I had to go all in.

A few days later, I got the mail that I was selected for the interview, a fruit of my hard work.

STAGE 2

This is the part where I messed up. I used to think that who needs React-theory when you can simply code it. I had never given any importance to the theory. On the interview day, I spent a few hours watching react interviews and thought that I understood all the concepts. But the problem was, I could answer the concepts in one sentence, but could not follow up when he went deeper into the theory. Well, there were instances where I mentally slapped myself for not able to answer a direct question and others where I had no clue what was going on. What on earth is a React fiber or a React pipeline anyway? Well, I am in no position to complain. I ought to have known those.

It did not go all bad. He told me that I did better than most freshers. In the application form, I had asked for 15 LPA :) He told me that the fresher salary that they gave out recently was near 8 LPA, so I could not be offered more than that in any scenario. We talked about BigBinary work culture and Ruby on Rails for the rest of the time. The interview ended with a slight hope on my side, or so I feel.

Come what come may, fingers crossed, hoping for the best…

EDIT: I got the offer letter 1 week later, and am extremely excited to join the BigBinary family.

Let me first take an anticipatory bail. It was a tough week for me before the interview: examinations, assignments, placement training, and final year project came all together, driving me out of sync with my preparation. Well, I know these are lame excuses. I still managed to refresh my data structures and algorithms, database management, Java, and other handpicked topics, which I thought would be relevant.

I was allotted the 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM slot. Clearly, the interviewer seemed exhausted after hearing a lot of candidates bragging about themselves. By the time I came in, he had lost his cool and was wearing only a banyan, that too a semi-yellow, stretched one. An excellent start, isn’t it? I might get more technical in this article as I wish to discuss the questions asked and how I responded to them.

He asked me to introduce myself. Well, this question is pretty straightforward. I had a minute long answer pre-prepared just for this to get a great first impression. Into the first 10 seconds of the introduction, he just stood up and left from the frame and came back as I finished. In addition to this, there was some parallel meeting happening supposedly in the adjacent room. I could hear someone scolding some tech guy for not meeting the deadlines. Nice motivation!

The first question was to write a program to find the transpose of a matrix. Piece of cake! This question is not even worthy of finding a place in an interview. The next question was to code merge sort. Easy one once again! Woohoo… I was pretty pleased with myself already. Next, he asked me to write an SQL query to find the 5th highest salary. Damn, I knew that one, but the key-part was completely erased from my brain. The correct answer is “SELECT salary FROM employee ORDER BY SALARY DESC LIMIT 5, 1”. I tried something with chaining queries in the shared screen sharing platform. He didn’t seem to be interested in my attempts.

Next, he moved to Operating Systems. I thought I was kinda good at it. So I thought, “fire away”! The first question was, “what are the different types of operating systems”? Remember the last modules of the book that you study only at the last moment and forget forever? This was one such topic. Doesn’t matter, next question, please. “What are the different layers in an operating system”? Wait, what? There are layers in an operating system? Dammit! “At least, tell me what a kernel is”; I managed to give a decent reply for that one.

Okay, since you are not much good at Operating System, let’s move to Microprocessors (Really!). I couldn’t even understand how he framed the question :( Something to do with interrupts with a twist. Realizing I was not good at this, he asked general questions in the subjects that almost everyone can answer decently.

Next, he moved to Database. Finally, he had come to my stronghold. He asked me to explain the different normalizations. Bull’s eye! I explained 1NF, 2NF, and almost started 3NF when he interrupted and changed the subject. Supposedly, he didn’t want to ask questions which I could answer well.

Next, he asked about the parts of an IP address, TCP/IP protocol, HTTP, and stateless protocols. I could answer most of them, at least in bits and pieces.

Next, he asked two logical questions. I don’t understand why I fumbled on the first one. It was too easy and straightforward. I think the back-to-back questions which I could not answer made my mind numb. I shall reproduce the questions anyway:

1. Four people wanted to cross a bridge. The time taken for each person to cross the bridge is given (1 min, 2 min, 5 min, and 7 min). Only one torch is available, and it is a necessity while crossing the bridge. At a time, at-most two people can cross the bridge. Find the minimum time taken to cross the bridge (For example, if 1 and 5 go together, it will take 5 minutes to cross the bridge and so on). The answer is 14 minutes.
2. You have two candles. A candle will completely melt in one hour. You are allowed to burn the candles from both ends. How will you measure 45 minutes?

Next, he moved to Data Structures. I was prepared for this one. One final chance to prove myself perhaps, or it is already too late. He asked, “what is a binary tree, and what are its applications? Also, how do we find the leaf node at the largest distance from the root node”. I was expecting these kinda questions and had prepared well for them. So I just fired away.

Finally, the interview came to an end. The interviewer asked me if I had any questions for him. Unfortunately, my magic question didn’t work-out the charm this time. No worries. Everything seems impossible until it’s done. Just explore, dream, and discover…

EDIT: To my surprise, a month later I got the offer letter for Systems Engineer-Specialist role (5 LPA) for successfully clearing the interview, welcoming me to the Infosys family.

The interview was on short notice with just 2 days to prepare. I started reading TCS CodeVita interview experiences in GeeksForGeeks and saw some YouTube videos on the same as well. I had lost touch of the previous semester subjects, and it scared me how little I remember the concepts. I spent the next two days brushing up the concepts and prepared for technical and HR.

The interview was divided into four panels. I figured out that they were sorted rank-wise. My interview was scheduled at 12:30PM in panel 2. At 12:25PM I got the call that there was some delay in panel 2, so I should join in panel 1 instead. It’s like “Wait what? You ain’t nervous? Here you go, I am switching panels in the last minute”.

It was five against one. After a few introductory questions, the technical interviewer took over. I realized that they had my CodeVita solution and my resume in front of them. Fortunately, I did remember my solution logic and could answer the questions based on it. Next, I was made to explain various projects I had mentioned in the resume. Next, HR took over and asked me general questions like strengths, weaknesses, and things like that.

Finally, the last interviewer took over. Let’s call him the boss (Unlucky that I don’t remember his name). He seemed curious about all the skills I had mentioned in the resume. I am more oriented towards mobile application development and showed him how all the skills point to the same direction. Finally, he told me he just wanted to check if I was not bluffing about any skill. Then some general questions like “Why TCS?” and “Where do you see yourself in 5 years” followed. Finally, he asked me whether I had any questions for him. Well, it was the last chance to impress him. So I asked the question I had prepared with a lot of thought. He said he really liked the question and answered for 5 minutes straight. Sorry reader, I am not mentioning the question here. I plan to use it a few more times :)

EDIT 1: After a long wait, I received an offer letter for TCS Ninja and an opportunity to attend TCS Digital hiring test.

EDIT 2: The promised TCS Digital hiring test never happened. I had lost all hopes in getting into TCS Digital.

Then came CodeVita round 2. By that time I had decided that I needed to shift from Python to C++. Though the code is 2 to 3 times longer, several language libraries and optimisations guarantee less chance of getting a TLE. C++ STL is a beast. I secured rank 215 (2nd in Trivandrum region). I was in a state beyond ecstasy. But it was short-lived. Soon, I realised that the round 2 does not have hiring. Back to disappointment stage.

EDIT 3: The final chance of converting the Ninja profile to Digital profile was through Digital Capability Assessment (DCA). By that time, I had already made up a mindset that I had a lot of bad luck for getting into TCS. I prepared very less (one day to be precise). The test was to be conducted on the TCS IBA Launcher software in Windows. I had screwed up my Windows by forcing an optional update, so, I had to take the test from my friend’s laptop. Even on the test day, I faced an issue that several others faced in DCA. I was provided a single programming language: C. I did not raise an issue or try to solve the issue myself, just went with the flow. I solved both the problems under 20 minutes (total time 60 minutes).

After few weeks, I got the mail that I qualified the DCA and am offered the TCS Digital cadre. I got the updated offer letter soon after. I guess this is the end of my TCS hiring journey. A long and rough ride that finally bore fruit. Am I happy? Not sure. I think my brain has not yet registered that I got what I aimed for. Like Dory said: just keep swimming… just keep swimming…

It was almost a week after IdeaFest19 finals and my team assembled once again, this time for a hackathon. It was the first experience for all the three of us. It was conducted by InQ Innovations. It was a 30-hour hackathon starting at 10AM on 6th of July. It was the first of a series of hackathons to be conducted by them.

The key difference between an “Idea-thon” and a hackathon is that the former is all about the best idea. In hackathon, no matter how big the idea, if you cannot come with the best product in the given span of time, its just useless.

There were 21 teams coming from different parts of South India. About half of us we first-timers. We got a quick introduction about the schedule. We had to select a theme out of the 5 that were provided. There would be two checkpoints for evaluation. The fist one was at 5:30PM and the second one at 9:30AM. The selected 8 teams would pitch their product at 12:00 Noon.

We chose Emergency Response as our theme and started our brain-storming. We dropped various ideas as none of us had the expertise to implement it. Finally we came up with a plan to detect accidents in CCTV footage of junctions and alert the authorities to provide quick response to it.

Before the first checkpoint, we quickly spotted the problem with our approach. Our program drew a rectangle around every vehicle and pedestrian in the CCTV footage using Haar-Cascade, if they intersect, it would be termed as an accident and it would update the database. But the issue was almost every one of the rectangles intersected in the busy traffic, throwing false alerts. The mentors pointed it out pretty easily and asked us to have a different approach to tackle the problem.

One of the mentors suggested to check the flow of traffic instead. As our original plan is useless, we were back to square one. The new plan was to detect anomalies in road. Whenever there is a traffic jam at green signal, it is an anomaly. This may be due to an accident, car break down or any other issue that needs a quick response. The details of the anomalies would be updated in a database. Criticality of the anomaly is measured by the accident detection algorithm. This time we divided the tasks at hand. Calvin worked on perfecting accident part using TensorFlow API, Cyriac worked on the database and analytics of accidents and I started working on the detection of anomalies using convolutional neural network.

Working late night, without sleep is not as bad as it seems. Its quite interesting to learn and try out new things; the joy of seeing it finally work is enormous.

There was a Kahoot competition at 2 AM early morning to release the stress (It’s fastest-finger-first type of quiz competition). We could see the other teams working hard to finish their product in time, some of them using a lot of hardware.

Finally we could somehow integrate database, UI, TensorFlow and convolutional neural network in making a working model. The mentors were not at all interested in any PowerPoint. It’s just not worth their time. They needed us to just explain our demo in the provided time. This time I messed up with the time part and we could not explain our work completely. Every team submitted their code for checking plagiarism and efficiency using a software.

No one knew the 8 teams that could make it to the final round at 12 Noon. When a team name is called, they had to pitch their product. To our surprise, we were selected too. We presented pretty well this time. A team from Bangalore bagged the First Prize.

It was a very good experience for us. When we parted, we had just one thought, next time we shall come with better knowledge and expertise.

Please read Rising from the Ashes to get the full info.

The Annual State Convention of ISTE , Sangrah 18, made us revise our schedules as we lost a weekend. We compensated it by bagging first prize in code relay.

Two successive visits to Ignite tuition center gave us an idea of what the app they had in mind.

In the first visit we presented the prototype of the app that we had in our mind.

Mr. Abhilash, one of the partners of Ignite tuition center, was quite delighted by our work and said that security was their top priority and they will implement it only after testing on 100 students.

A second visit was crucial. Mr. Rahul, the second partner, clarified all our doubts regarding the app. The long discussion made us realise that our prototype needed a lot of modifications.

The meeting was followed by a brainstorming session the very next day where we drew a layout of our app. It was quite a mess! Lekin picture abhi baaki hai mere dosth…

Please read The Unexpected Twist to get the full info

W e were stranded in the Swaraj Round for yet another day walking long stretches for another customer, preferably a from a tuition center. We were lucky enough to find two.

Our first client was Mr. Shimjith N K from Pioneer tuition center. They are well established and have four branches in Kerala. They desire an app in play store that markets their centers, provide all the necessary study materials and conduct online examinations.

Our second client was Rahul from Ignite coaching center. To our surprise they were graduates from our own college, to be precise: the 2010 batch. They were not interested in online study materials. Instead they preferred an app to post notifications about their classes, clarify doubts and mark attendance.

Both our clients have entirely different approach, but are equally challenging and supportive. I thank both of them for their enthusiastic support for our initiative.

Read more: Pandemonium

Please read Miles to go before I sleep to get the full info.

W e were very steamed up on designing the prototype of our billing app. Lipton and Mr. Girish were very pleased to see our efforts.

Soon we encountered an unforeseen hurdle. All the customers demand for a hard copy of the bill. Bills not only help them know the total cost, but also it helps them replace misplaced orders. No other alternative than buying a new printer was encouraged.

Problems faced:

1. A handheld printer will cost at least ₹2500. But most of them already contains an inbuilt software which is completely secure.

2. A better printer costs more, which they won’t encourage.

3. Many customers either do not have a phone or restrain from sharing their contact number.

So, we decided to drop our first idea.

Read more: Rising from the Ashes

A two-day workshop on Android Studio basics and an informal meetup over coffee with our senior Felix Josemon has shaped our thoughts and spirits a lot. A brief narration of how he won the Google Venkat Scholarship left us awestruck and inspired for doing something innovative.

We formed teams of four or five and were asked to tackle real world problems and find practical solutions for them through android apps(mostly).

Our self-sufficient team consisting of Ajay Ravindran, Harikrishnan G, Calvin Wilson, Abilash Sajeev and myself found ourselves circumnavigating the Swaraj Round for an evening and a day learning business in shops and finding problems in their system.

We found out that majority of the shops did not have a computerized billing system. They provided written bills. Every day records are to be written, accounts are to be cross-checked, rent is to be paid and profit is to be calculated. But still the accounts did not tally. Moreover, they had to submit a GST bill every month-end showing all the sales of that month.

We understood that this was a very tedious process. So, we proposed to digitalize it.

We found two clients first one being Lipton from Fashion Fabrics who was ready to share their problems without hesitation.

Our second client, Mr. Girish M. is an enthusiastic businessman who runs SS Mills Kochi, famous for their handloom textiles. He has his main center in Kochi and a branch in Guruvayur. He was thrilled to hear that we were purely on education basis and he extended his whole-hearted support for our project.

I thank Mr. Girish M. and Lipton for their enthusiastic support for our project. I sincerely thank our senior, mentor and constant companion Felix Josemon without whom the whole project would be just a dream…

Read more : The Unexpected Twist