PlaceKode with Pratyush Ranjan placed at Reliance Jio and Capgemini

Uthaan, the Official Journalism and Recreational Club of ABV-Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Gwalior is back with a new season of PlaceKode to get you up to speed and prepared to get placed at the company of your dreams. With us, we have Pratyush Ranjan who has been offered fulltime roles at Reliance Jio and Capgemini, sharing his interview experience.

First of all, congratulations on being placed in such a well-established company. What was your instant reaction or feeling after you secured a job in Reliance-Jio and Capgemini?

It feels great to be associated with one of the biggest Indian companies, Jio. I was initially placed in Capgemini, i.e., a service-based Grade B company, but I always wanted to work at a product-based Grade A company. Soon after Capgemini, Reliance Jio came into our campus, and I was lucky enough to get placed there. I am the kind of person who prefers a well-established company over a start-up because we get a sense of security and stability there. And since Jio is a reputed company with a fair amount of funding and collaborations, so I was happy with the thought that I had secured a spot in Jio.

Can you please brief us about your job profiles?

At Capgemini, I was offered a position of a senior analyst. At Jio, I’ll be an SDE-1. I will be joining one of their development teams [like Jio apps, Jio Tv, Jio payment services, etc.] in Mumbai or Bangalore.

What was your state of mind before the interview? Were you a bit nervous or somewhat optimistic?

Initially, we didn’t know which companies were going to visit our campus, so I was prepared with my resume, and my skills brushed up. On the day of the interview, I was a bit nervous at the start since I had faced many interviews and some rejections in the PPO’s. So I just believed in myself and prepared myself mentally to crack the next company, whatever be the circumstances.

Can you please walk us through your interview process. How many rounds were present in the selection process and the questions asked by the interviewer?

For Capgemini

The first round was an assessment round in which I was asked four questions back to back, and these were all elimination rounds. The first was a technical pseudo-code test, which was MCQ based on outputs and few questions on code debugging. Even some questions on the basics of data structures and algorithms were present. Then the second round was an English communication skills test. The third round was a behavioral test. And the final round was a game based aptitude test, which was a completely new round for all of us.

After clearing all these rounds, we had a technical interview followed by an HR interview. In the technical interview, I was asked to explain my B. Tech. Project briefly and a few cross-questions on it. Then some basic questions on the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and object-oriented programming.

In my HR interview, I was asked to tell my strengths and weaknesses; then they asked me to describe that phase of my life where I felt low and my expectations from the company.

For Reliance-Jio

I first had an online coding test in which there were two mediocre coding questions which we were supposed to complete in one hour.

After two days, I was informed that I had been shortlisted for the further interview round. Further, we had two technical interviews and one HR interview.

In my first technical interview, the interviewer gave me two coding questions to be solved in one hour. They had a code-sharing feature through which I was supposed to share my code, and I was given 30 minutes for each question. I gave an optimal approach for both the problems, and the interviewer was satisfied.

But after my first technical round, I thought I was rejected because I didn’t receive any further mail or text from the company. But the next day, I got a mail from the HR team regarding my second technical round.

For my second technical round, I didn’t have any time to revise the concepts. Luckily, the pattern for me was the same as the first technical round, which wasn’t the case for the rest of my colleagues. Again, in the second round, I was given two coding questions to be solved in one hour. But the twist there was, I didn’t have to write the code simply but also compile and run the codes. So firstly I gave the brute force approach and then the optimal approach. Since I also had to execute the code, it was a bit challenging for me. But I was lucky enough to solve both the questions in the allotted time.

Just after one hour of this round, I got a mail for the final HR round. The HR first asked me to explain my internship project, which I did in Innovaccer. She was very impressed with that since I was an SDE intern there, but I did a project on something which a site reliability engineer should know. Then she asked me to think and pitch a start-up idea and few cross-questions. Then some average questions like, why do you want to join Jio, a decision that changed your life. In the end, we had a long discussion on another start-up idea. It was a fun interactive session it wasn’t much like an HR interview. The interview, which was supposed to be of 20 minutes, extended to more than one hour.

A few coding questions in the rounds were:

Online Coding test:

1)Find the frequency for the occurrence of a substring in a given string.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/frequency-substring-string/

2)Count of a minimum number of lines that will cover or travel all the N points in a 2-D space.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-lines-cover-points/

Technical round 1:

1)Find the first negative number in every window of size K.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/first-negative-integer-every-window-size-k/

2)Find a non-repeating character in the stream of strings.

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-first-non-repeating-character-stream-characters/

Technical round 2:

I was given a list of players’ names, and if they have the same first name and surname had to cluster them together. Furthermore, they asked me to find the number of clusters present and which set had the maximum number of players.

How did you keep your calm between successive interview rounds? Were you nervous or relieved after clearing consecutive interview rounds?

In the Reliance Jio interview, I was stuck in the very first question, and it was a silly mistake; even the interviewer couldn’t find it for minutes, so I felt a bit pressured in that situation. But you see, there is no turning back at such times, and you need to be patient. So I composed myself as I tried to remain calm and gave the rest of the interview confidently. This attitude was developed due to the experience I had from my previous interviews and internships. Even facing rejections from some good companies provided me with motivation, which helped me remain calm. One can know how to stay calm in such hectic situations only after he has given a minimum of 6 to 7 interviews. Also, one must believe in themselves while sitting for interviews.

What, according to you, is the right balance between coding and development? Which part should one highlight in their resume?

You have to equally good in coding and development; you can’t fill your resume with your coding skills or your rank in CodeChef only. You need to have some projects and internships by your side. So in your pre-final year and final year, when you have to do your summer internships, you also realize the importance of development, as there is much need for one’s development skills. So it’s not compulsory to dive deep into competitive programming; the basics of data structures and algorithms are enough. Above that, you need to be good at development. But the main thing is, one should focus on his/her general problem-solving skills to crack the interviews.

When a candidate is appearing for off-campus interviews his or her resume matters a lot. They focus on the person’s dev skills as they require people who are comfortable with the stack prevalent in the company’s work culture. But when a company arrives for on-campus hiring, they understand that not all students are good in the same thing. so they retort to assessing program solving skills, CP skills and knowledge of the core subjects.

What resources should one follow to crack these interviews? Did you specifically solve questions keeping Reliance-Jio or Capgemini in your mind?

I prepared for the interviews of startups and well-established companies, Capgemini was a backup for me. The most efficient way is to prepare your own notes. In my case, I prepared my notebook, which had some basic text tags, some questions related to the library, fundamentals concepts, and interview questions on DBMS, OS, SQL, etc. these notes help a lot to quickly revise for the interview.

For text tag — www.mongodb.com

For node JS— www.Nodejs.org, www.mongodb.com

For basics — www.tutorialspoint.com

DBMS — Database system concepts by Henry F. Korth; other relevant articles can be found on medium and GeeksForGeeks

OS from — Object Oriented Programming in C++ by E Balagurusamy and Ravindra Babu videos on YT (uncode- GATE computer science)

A must prepare 100 liked interview question list on www.leetcode.com,

For last-minute interview preparation, there is a must-do interview preparation course on www.geeksforgeeks.org, which everyone should definitely checkout.

What role did your various internship experiences played in your interview process? Were there some new qualities that you acquired as an intern? Was the interviewer curious about it at all?

The first thing that I learned many things from internships that helped me in my full-time interviews. You know, from the internships in the pre-final year, you get exposure to the corporate world. Also, I worked as a Site Reliability Engineer, which was completely a new field for me. The second thing was, all this boosted my confidence. In my resume, I had various projects like game development in my first year, web development in my second, and blockchain and stuff in the following years. The most beneficial thing from my internships was working as an SRE(Site Reliability Engineer), which fascinated most of the interviewers I faced during my placements. The third thing that I learned from my internship experience was managing panic situations a little bit. Also, from the mentor and intern relationship, I was able to explain my things freely and nicely, which was really helpful at the time of the interviews.

In your resume, you had mentioned development, machine learning, and also you told us about blockchain right now. How can one be a jack of all trades excelling in every field? How can one be this multi-talented?

See, there is nothing like the jack of all trades or multi-talented. I did game development in my first year because I liked it and did an internship on it the same year, then I wanted to explore the web development field, so I did that for a while. The crucial thing is one has to be confident enough on a skill before putting it on his/her resume. My projects on SRE and blockchain worked like a cherry on the cake for me as most interviewers had very less knowledge of it. So one must be curious enough about the offbeat projects as it interests the interviewers, and it lowers the chances for a difficult question to be asked on the particular project.

What role do a person’s managerial and co-curricular experiences play during the placement interviews?

Actually, In my first three years of college life, I have organized a lot of events. Starting from the first year, I was sponsorship and events head. In the second year, I was an EMT head in the cultural event and coordinator in the technical and cultural fest MOM. In my third year, I was the overall coordinator (OC) of Infotsav, a technical event.

Many people would give you advice not to waste time in these co-curricular activities instead do competitive coding. But I would clearly like to tell you that you are only investing your time by participating in these activities. These activities help to groom your overall personality. It develops your communication skills, boosts your confidence, enhances your managerial and team managerial l skills, and a lot. All these skills will help you in the future in your corporate life.

Our position of responsibilities doesn’t help us in our technical interview but it surely helps in our HR interview. As if they ask me several questions on time management or questions regarding how will you manage if there is a clash between your teammates, and in these cases, if we give them a real-life example, so we can have a good discussion about all these things with our HR.

This indeed makes a positive impact on the HR.

How’d you compare to a five-year-old version of yourself?

You know, you can’t compare yourself with your five-year-old version. If you would have met me five years ago, I was completely different, a bit shy, lacking in confidence, and also nervous. But these five years of college life has transformed me completely. Now I am a bit sincere, and I choose my words carefully now. You see, the learning curve would increase exponentially. This is not just the case for me but for every student.

Would you like to give any particular advice to your juniors as we wrap up this conversation?

I have straightforward advice for my juniors, You need to do hard work for learning, but you need to do smart work for interview preparations. From this, I mean that, whenever you are learning something new, there are many new things you need to learn that doesn’t have any pre-defined path, So one need to put in a lot of hard work. But there is a pre-defined path for cracking an interview; one knows what all things they have to cover based on their resume. The topics they have to cover, essential questions we know these things beforehand. So if one has a good plan and they work smartly, it becomes easy to crack an interview. But in the long run, only hard work will benefit you.

For interview purposes, one must read recent interview articles on geeks for geeks of the companies they are going to sit. These are really beneficial. Also, I would suggest everyone to write a paragraph for their introduction, as it is the first thing everyone would be asked to tell, and even it would be the first impression of yours to the interviewer. Similarly, frame 2–3 paragraphs for their projects as during the interview, there will be many thoughts running in your mind so you won’t be able to explain your project properly.

Some advice for an internship would be don’t panic, as no one would judge you there because even your mentors know that you are in your life’s learning phase. So just give in your 100 percent in every project you receive as an intern.

At last, I would just like to quote the phrase that, everything doesn’t go the way as planned, but at the end, everything comes into place. So don’t panic, be patient. Even if you fail, don’t feel demotivated there are a lot of companies and start-ups.

Interviewed by Aryan Sharma and Paridhi Singhal

Coordinated by Shivam Yadav