Cognizant GenC Interview Experience
Summary
I had a structured and insightful interview experience with Cognizant for the Programmer Analyst Trainee / .NET Developer role, covering both fundamental concepts and practical problem-solving, which went very smoothly.
Full Experience
On August 26, 2025, I attended an interview with Cognizant for the Programmer Analyst Trainee / .NET Developer position. The process was well-structured, combining theoretical knowledge with practical coding and system design challenges. I felt confident discussing object-oriented programming, demonstrating coding skills for standard problems, explaining database concepts, and detailing the architecture and scalability of my personal project. The interviewer's engagement and positive feedback on my clarity and problem-solving approach made it a truly valuable experience.
Interview Questions (8)
The interviewer began by testing my object-oriented concepts, asking for the differences between Abstract Classes and Interfaces.
I was asked to write a simple palindrome checker function for a given string.
Next, they asked for code to check if a given integer is a prime number.
They asked basic questions regarding JUnit, including 'What is JUnit?', 'Why do we use unit testing?', 'What is an annotation?', and 'Difference between @Before, @After, @Test'.
I was asked to list and explain examples of DDL (Data Definition Language), DML (Data Manipulation Language), and TCL (Transaction Control Language) commands in SQL.
They asked for a SQL query to fetch the 2nd largest salary from an 'employees' table without using the LIMIT clause.
This was a classic puzzle: measure exactly 4 litres of water using only a 3-litre jug and a 5-litre jug.
They asked several system design questions related to my personal project, covering its architecture, API handling, database schema, scalability, error handling, logging, user capacity, and security measures.