My Tesco Interview Experience (On-Campus)

Hello Everyone, Tesco recently visited our college with an Internship and performance-based PPO offer. Since the Placement season has already begun it’s high time for me to share my experience so that you can get a glimpse of what questions are companies asking during interviews.

Step 1: Firstly the Resumes were shortlisted, can roughly guess that around 150 students were shortlisted for giving the coding/Aptitude round.

Step 2: Aptitude & Coding

In the aptitude round, simple questions were asked, and simple maths was based on compound interest. In the same round after solving the aptitude questions you had to solve 2 coding questions, both were Easy-Medium level questions. One question was from arrays where you had to apply Maps data structure and another question was also from arrays implementation based in 2D matrix.

Interview begins →

Round 1: Interview 1 (Technical Interview)

13 People cleared the coding round and now it was time for the technical interview.

CN →

1. Explain to me the entire process of Computer Networking.
2. Explain the difference between DNS and DHCP servers.
3. What are the different models that you are aware of that are being used for Networking? Explain the difference between each(Had to explain OSI Model and TCP/IP model)(Explained each layer)
4. What are the Instances where TCP is better than UDP and vice versa?

OS →

1. What are the different Operating Systems that you are aware of? (I said Windows and Linux)
2. What is the difference between Windows and Linux?
3. What do you mean by MultiThreading and MultiProcessor Systems?

DBMS →

1. What databases have you worked on?
2. Design Library Management System? (A lot of edge cases were given so it was not simply just making tables and making several foreign keys and primary keys)
3. While Handling the above edge cases several other questions were asked like how would you implement a foreign key, candidate key, or primary key?
4. What is indexing? (Here I explained about row indexing but the interviewer was not that satisfied with the answer)

DBMS Indexing in DBMS - javatpoint

Please go through the above link to understand the same and not make the same mistake that I did → Default row indexing is also a type of indexing in DBMS but not the answer an interviewer expects.

OOPS & DSA →

1. How would you review a code? what would be the process? (This question was asked directly from my resume since I was a TA Intern at Outscal Previously)
2. Do you remember the Code that you have written during the test? I answered no… since it had been quite some time. He was kind and showed me the question and I immediately remembered how I solved it.

It was the array question where we had to use Maps to solve it in O(N) time complexity and O(N) space complexity. Now during the interview, the interviewer asked me to solve it in O(1) time. So I thought for a bit and gave the solution which I felt is implementable was I myself was highly doubtful where I would be able to implement it. The logic goes as follows →

I would use the indexes of the array itself as HashMap and no need for extra map space would be required but still, it would have to traverse the array at least once. So I was able to reduce the SC of the question to O(1) but not time complexity.

He was very happy with the solution and said that O(N) is the best time complexity that can be achieved on this problem and he just wanted to see how I think. So be aware of the interviews and always stay alert and calm during interviews(I felt this was the make-or-break question for me)

Projects →

1. What is the real-time problem that you have solved using the current skill sets that you have? (I described one of my ML Projects and one Python Project)
2. What are you passionate about?

Interviewer: Do you have any questions for me? (I asked him about company work culture and day in life at Tesco stuff)

After round 1 only 6 people remained out of 13 and fortunately, I was one of them.

Round 2: Interview 2(Behavioral Round)

1. How Many Friends do you have Ayan? (I answered 10)
2. Assume you have 5 very close friends and 5 normal(hi hello friends) and you are the team lead, How would you avoid biases among your true friends and normal friends? (Answer was pretty simple to just know the unknown better, know what they are good at, and go for team outings so that my friends who are very close also get to know them who are not, this way team chemistry would increase and the team will play on its strengths also in the same time we would be able to learn from each other which would result in direct growth in terms of professional life)
3. Now Assume that in your team 2 team members have a conflict. what would you do?
4. Assume in your team a guy has contributed very less and left the team would his/her name still be there in the final submission of the project?

He went on to give more situations and expected more solutions for the same.

Interviewer: Do you have any questions for me?

Me: One Year from now in the future what would make you tell that this was the best ever hire you ever made and the best decision of your life?

He went on to describe some characteristics of the ideal candidate that he thought would fit into the company well.

Three people were finally selected by Tesco as SDE Interns from our college.

I hope you liked the Internship Interview Experience!