I participated in an on-campus interview opportunity at CDAC. The process began with an offline MCQ exam covering various subjects like DBMS, OOPs, programming, Python, and JavaScript, all at a basic level.

First Technical Interview

This was my initial interview. The interviewer focused on my development experience, asking about REST APIs. We then discussed DBMS and delved deeply into OS concepts, particularly multithreading. Following this, we explored the differences between linear and non-linear data structures, moving into graphs and trees. She questioned me on tree traversal, graph traversal, their differences, and implementation details. I also explained Dijkstra's Algorithm thoroughly. Finally, questions on Stack and Queue were posed, followed by the Two Sum and Three Sum problems. I was shortlisted for the second round after this.

Second Round (Technical + HR)

In this round, the discussion centered around operating system concepts such as Race Condition vs. Deadlock vs. Starvation, and Aging. We had a deep discussion on Error vs. Exception. I was also asked about Semaphores and challenged to write multithreading code, a topic I hadn't studied at the time. Unfortunately, I was not shortlisted after this round.

This was my first interview experience where I didn't receive an offer, but I learned a significant amount. I identified my weak points, which I subsequently addressed, helping me to succeed in my next two interviews. It reinforced the idea that rejections shouldn't be feared; instead, they should be used as opportunities to improve.