My interview experience

DATE: 11th August 2009
COMPANY: HP
COLLEGE: PSG TECH, Coimbatore.

4:00pm
TECHNICAL ROUND:
Highly tensed.I asked myself, "What do u think u can do to impress them?".And only at that time I realized the need for a super human power is so inevitable. The gentleman who conducted the interview was excellent :)

He started the interview from the next second.
1.He gave a program and asked what is scope and life of a variable. How does static work? I answered this question terribly wrong. But then i said, am not sure about the answer.
2.Where are the global, local variables stored in memory? I managed to answer them.
3.Write a code for in-order traversal. I wrote the recursive solution.
4.He gave a binary tree and asked to write the in-order, pre-order ,post-order traversals?
5.What is balancing a binary tree? Since i was not sure i said i don't know. but he continued asking what is the complexity to search an element in a binary tree. I didn't knew this by heart so i calculated that in front of him.(log n). He continued in the same pace: does you formula work for a binary tree 89-78-67-54-47-32(skewed).i said no. Then can u guess what balancing a binary would mean? "the process of infusing optimality to the tree so that the no of steps to search an element is log n". i think he expected that answer so badly. "excellent" he said.(Some times, you end up cooking answers so well that they are more appealing than the learned ones, but very rarely) :)
6.Write a code to delete a node from a linked list. This time i gave him a reasonably good code. But he wasn't impressed. He said the code lacked naming constraints. I asked him for an other try. This time it was a fata-fat code :)
7.What is memory leak? answered.
8.I didn't answer the OS questions very well.
9.One last question: given an list of numbers. How do you find the second largest element, by traversing the list once. i thought 'never heard the question before. how difficult this is gonna be'. I took a paper and tried from the scratch. The solution was so easy to arrive. He was reasonably impressed.
10.You have anything to ask? I said I would love to work with hp and If I didn't meet your requirements, i would like to make sure that i will prepare myself in course of time if opportunity permits :) thank you....


After some five minutes results came.I was shortlisted for the next hr round. I was very happy and equally tensed.

5:00pm
HR ROUND
It went on very well since they concentrated on my project. It turned out an added advantage for me(My posts, while doing that project would reveal the reason).It lasted for 30 minutes.


10:45 pm
The results came and ten of them from my college including me were selected. Happy :)
(For detailed interrogations please mail me: anbu.myid@gmail.com)

"THERE ARE AS MANY INSTANCES OF INTERVIEWS ,AS THERE ARE HUMAN TRAITS, RARELY PRODUCING TWINS"

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