Placement preparation and SAP LABS interview experience

Placement Preparation:

  I started refreshing my programming skills from december (after my 7th semester internship) by solving problems from hackerrank (my hackerrank profile). I started my intense preparation from may. I followed the IPL schedule, given by our seniors. Though I couldn't able to cover all the domains listed over there, I have concentrated on programming tasks since I had Data structures as my area of interest.

 I have uploaded the programs and concepts ( problems drive link ) and posted a part of it in this blog.

SAP Interview experience:
 There were 5 rounds
 1. online test
 2. Technical (panel)
 3. Technical (Face to Face)
 4. Managerial
 5. HR

1. Online test:

SAP online test
 In the two programming questions I have solved one question (6 out of 9 sample test cases passed) and did mcq quite well.

  The test was attended by 500+ students. They shortlisted 18 students.
 I got shortlisted in the online test.

2. Technical (panel):

•     Introduction about myself
•     I had 4 projects in my resume, and they asked which one is comfortable for me, I chose my recent(mini project in 8th sem) project. They asked some questions related to the project.
•     They asked in which language I am comfortable, I said java and c. They asked differences between c an java. I answered that c  is structured and java is object oriented language and some other differences. And from then they asked questions based on OOPS concepts (inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, abstraction, interfaces). The interviewers were expecting in depth understanding in OOPs. They also asked me to write code snippets for the concepts and to explain the working of the code.
•     I was asked to sort the array in reverse order. I wrote code for bubble sort and modified a line to get the resulting array in descending order. They asked me to explain the working of the code with some iterations. After that, they asked me to swap the numbers without using temp variable. I used the logic a= a+b, b = a-b and a = a-b to swap two variables ( a and b ).
•     They asked about exception handling, checked, unchecked , arithmetic, nullpointer...exceptions. They asked me to write the code consisting all the exceptions and asked me regarding the flow of the code(like will the code stop executing after exception, where the control will go if exception occurs and exception not occurs).

      I got shortlisted for the next round

3. Technical (face to face):

•       Given a string print all possible substrings starting with 'A' and ending with 'I'
•       Given a string consisting of numbers and letters, calculate the sum of the numbers in the string. If the numbers were consecutive you should consider it as one number, eg: "AN54BC7IKL67" the sum should be sum = 54+7+67
•      He asked me a puzzle regarding printing numbers in perfect triangle. The point here is, as the numbers increase there may be numbers with 2 or more digits. I have to adjust the spaces accordingly.
•      He asked question in some CS fundamentals like, operating system scheduling techniques, bit manipulation and why do we use it.

        I have done programming and fundamentals part well, but didn't solve that puzzle. I got shortlisted for the next round.

4. Managerial
   
      This round was mixed up with technical and general questions. He asked me about the projects. He appreciated me for learning python , django , ML (I have mentioned it in my project) technologies on my own though it was not in curriculum. He asked me to implement linked list and operations in the list and also to analyze the time complexity for that functions. He asked me that if I have any questions for him.I asked  "What is the most important skill for a manager?". He answered my question and asked me to wait for the results.

     Three people were shortlisted (including me) for the HR round

5. HR

    General HR questions like Why SAP? What are your strengths and weakness? Do you have any plans for higher studies? were asked.

    Out of the three, two were given the offer one person from BE and one person from Msc ( myself :D ) .