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"

.

face- mafia wars- book

one good game. now level 27 :) good to be a tyro. Wondering about the implementation strategy and why this game is so successful? Over 5 million playing daily.So is it every body wanted to be real life dons or atleast virtual dons? But for the don thing ,every body wanted to be somebody other than their present....Tats all the time i have...just 15 more exp points to reach level 28 :)

good old trip...

(from left: krishna, sidhu, visak)
(photo taken by: anbu)

Where? : VAITHEKI falls - 50 kms approx from Coimbatore city
Who all? : Anbarasu(anbu), Krishnaraj(gilli), Sidharth(sidhu), Siva visakan(visak)
When? : Thursday, May 29, 2008,
How? : Visak's car
For what/why? : !!!!!

First, the photo. Was it taken in a 'falls'?why this photo? Because this was the only photo taken in the trip. (follows the presumption that we didn't take any good cam).So why are these guys walking in such a weird place?
Answer: you ll know it at the end. But i cant help myself becoming frenzied even now, when i think of the "WALK", the above featured guys in the pic including me, had had for the next 1 hour, then. I mean it. We walked for an hour in an almost dense forest, which forgot the term:"a trace of any human inhabitation".........

We started from visak' house(visak,gilli,sidhu: my inmates in coll!) at around 8:30 in the morning. Our plan was to go to SIRUVANI falls(cheers kovai). Its such a good place. Everyone was desperate to hav a shower in a falls. It was a quiet comfortable, pretty decent driving by visak. No pit stops. We reached there at 9:30. But we have to walk through for some 15 mins to reach the falls, from the parking. On our strode, a guy coming back told its of no use going there, the falls is been flooded. holy s**t, told us in a sync :( But i insisted the guys to see it through. We walked to the falls. No surprise. Falls flooded. The weather was too good to leave from there. Nothing could be done there. We left the place. Walked back. Got in the car. Sobs. We began to depart. Grave silence.
gilli: "machi its noway that we are going back without being in a related sort(paused). We are going to VAITHEKI falls right now....
visak:"great.You know the route gilli?"
gilli:"No. I barely know there exists a falls of the name?"
others:"podaaaaa"
gilli:"I heard it is somewhere near siruvani hills"
others:"so much for a clue. but what dov we do if there isnt a falls anywhere?...."

(somebody started, 'hope for the best' philosophy....)


20 mins later:
me: anna how to go to vaitheki falls?
Passer by: (smiles) You wanna go there? Its very dangerous thambi. I think its almost impossible to be there. Lot of elephants.Moreover its been closed by the govt for safety concerns..."
me: "We ll manage na. just tell us the route..."
Passer by: (laughs again) there isn't a road to Vaitheki falls.....


(Did he say,a road to eldorado?) We were wondering. But a lot of "go straight-take a left-take a right's", took us somewhere near the farthest spot from the falls. The people on our way wondered at the 4 wheeled Opel's product with awe. No sign of a tar road. If I were to describe the road, which barely existed, 'under cons(truct)ideration' would be the word. But visak managed a mile or two. Only when we saw a 'road breaker' in the path. It was as huge a gully, a rift decent enough to be formed after a considerable explosion. A huge 'U' in the road. But there seemed a road after the rift. We were ought to cross the rift to keep our falls plan alive. After so much deliberation, our obsession decided rationally to take the turn, to cross the gully, what so ever. visak pulled from 1'st gear. full throttle. rpm at its max. tyres rolled slowly but steadily. finally we were up the the rift, and onto the road. We managed to drive some 5 to 6 kms in the road that followed. But we were stopped again, but this time relentlessly by a stream.We decided ,Its no way we can go further, but somebody completed 'in the car but for the legs'

We parked the car under a 'tree'. Took a wash in the 'stream'. Walked with our 'legs' towards the 'mountain' with the 'plants' across the 'rivulets' with one word 'hope'. So we were in the 'nature'. Completely within. Into the jungle. four of us.

One endless thought ran in our minds

"mother nature never betrays her children, if she does, its because she needs us in her lap....."

(the rest is definitely not a history. But in the next post)

saw one solved same : )

TAMIL

Though TAMIL is not my mother tongue[its kannada] i always had unexplanatory affection towards this language. Recently the language is branded as a Classical language. Its a big deal, since there are only 6 classical languages in the world enjoying this status, out of which 'greek and latin' are almost extinct because of their abstruse nature. For a language to be called as a classical language it is necessary for it to have an undated history ,rich eloquence and important: it should have given birth to atleast some languages. It all in compliance with Tamil but for more than these criterias.
I always wondered that we, at large use a language(english) which some people call a sexist, illogical language ,etc. And here in this context, if i were to mention "tamil is a classical language" in Tamil, it would be like "[tamil oru uyar thanichem mozhi]". Such a beauty. The former carries some bleak, comparitively, for sure.
There are many similar cases where english, fails to compete with tamil.
Eg:
ENGLISH: leaf
TAMIL: kolunthu, elai, thalir, paluppu, sarugu.
So as Norman Lewis said, we need voluninous words to think better, inturn to have better ideas.
So are we dogmatic enough to talk about the greatness of English?I personally have related thoughts, which end up ephemeral.
But this is different. because "I dont have to abuse a contemporary language to prove my love towards tamil".

247 alphabets:3000+ years of indefatigable journey through history:magnanimous literature:indomitable socital base:unquestionable creed: such beauty...

EVERY NEWS HAS ITS OWN IMPACTS...

I was totally unaware of the 'NEWS' which is coming to me in some ten minutes ....

I was playing cricket in my apartment ground with some of my friends .Mr.Apartment Secretary warned us for the bruises in his car, but we argued that it wasnt of the ball .These kind of related arguments arent new for us and this isnt about which i am about to scribe here...but a far more important thing...
[We'll always have a bunch of small children (but not that very small) who share our regime in the ground.They have their own games, and also play the role of spectators to our game if it goes any interesting.One such child is 'lakshan '.]
---->My friend who joined some time later, told us almost unvoiced,in atmost grief , "'lakshan's father died of an accident today morning" .He added answering to one of our immmediate question, "he was on his way from madurai to some place in trichy". i could hear "i havent seen that uncle even once:so sad:that corolla uncle da:so sad:this should not have happened ".None of us know much about him or about his family .I said that we should stop playing but a guy replied "what will happen if we stop playing".hmmm,right But the news rung so hard in my mind.We managed to play .........
I dont complain my apartment guys in any way or curse anybody who in this world might have been the reason for this unhappy ,disconsolate 'incident', or 'accident'. What ever i call , it is of no use to the 4 year old 'lakshan'...

But it strikes me so hard , the fact that: lot of things which are mere 'news' for us are dearly catastrophic to its very victims in some way or the other. The colleges were in full shutter for this whole week, but only few of us few of a times gave a thought that it is because of a problem in Srilanka ,where thousands of people doubt their very survival for the seconds to come. Neither did we when we learned the fact that 'Hamas is the militant group of palestine' in some newspaper. How many of us would chat about Satyam fraud with a good hot cup of coffee in our hand in the morning or merely talk about it ,if we had some 100000 satyam shares.if we had some then the fraud is no more a news......


Even if I mourn in the depth of my heart, nothing is gonna be fine for srilankans or palestinians or 'lakshan'. The existence of almighty can even be questioned now, but it has been done a lotta times in the past and people always come up with convincing answers as godly as possible.However life has to move on in some way or the other

"but if i read some news tomorrow somewhere i will stop myself for a second that this news is costing somebody ,somewhere in a way they never wanted to ..... "

dO we ( I ) grow intellectally as wel?

How many of us believe that happyness is relative, which also gathers me to the thought that people arent complacent enough with what they possess, but care the most in what others dont have,than they do. This egregious behaviour i would say, of human mind has become more common these days.

Why do we condone ourself for all those we do but never, when it comes to others?
Do we move towards something which has never been there?
Trying to find answers for all these related questions mean ,we are eccentric for our age(whatever the age may be)?
Or these are those which everybody had given a thought? but perhaps failed to give a second thought...
Or rather ,are these stuffs worth given a thought? or why not?

These psychic, Himalayan based, profit making thoughts are not necessary to be answered in any mediocre fashion...

Because for the very reason that

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL IN ALL THE WAYS IT HAS TO BE, AND IT HAS BEEN...

.