How to Crack Pakistan’s Software Engineering Interview for Fresh Graduates

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This article is for students who are graduating or want to break into the software industry of Pakistan.

The first step to get into is you should have a good resume. Today’s topic is not resume building so I’ll just skip(You can schedule a meeting for resume review) it. but one major …

Get Your Resume Straight

…tip to consider here for students who aren’t from LUMS, FAST, PUCIT, UET, NUST, IBA, Habib, PIEAS, GIKI, and few other major universities. Don’t include your university name in the resume. This will save you from discrimination and possibly a few months of time. At least you will receive an interview call.

Pakistan’s software industry is toxic and very biased(based on the university) towards fresh graduates except very few. They have policies and even their HR department mentions shamelessly “We only hire from {above-mentioned universities} and don’t consider any other” no matter how many certifications, real-time projects, and skillful one is.

Understand Industry

Pakistan’s software industry is largely service-based. They have dev team here in Pakistan and a sales or business acquisition team in the US mostly. Service-based companies' interviews are very easy and product-based interviews are a little bit tough but still easy compared to international standards.

Companies mostly work on the web or mobile development. Very few are working on data and blockchain-related tech.

Understand Interview Process

There are different rounds and sequences that could be different according to each company.

1. Resume screening + technical assessment(hacker rank/earth like platforms)
2. HR interview (15, 30, 60 minutes)
3. 1st technical interview
4. 2nd technical interview
5. 3rd interview(Optional/very Rare), Usually with CEO/product manager/VP engineering
6. Offer letter extend by company
7. Negotiation if possible
8. Offer accepted
9. Joining letter

HR Interview

I don’t know what exactly they look for maybe cultural fit.

HR usually ask

1. Do you have any plans for masters in next 2 or 5 years? Better to reply no.
2. What are your plans for the next 5 years?
3. What are your salary expectations? (Give Diplomatic answer*)
4. Which department would you like to join?
5. and few other questions.

*I am here to learn, and I know the company takes care of its employees so they can deliver at their best and they don’t have any anxiety based on salary.

Interview Questions Preparation

For interview preparation, hardly take one week.

Search on google “OOP interview questions”, “DSA interview questions” and “database interview questions” there would be top 3–4 links. Cover all those questions, understand them, they would be enough. These are the questions they are going to ask you.

Few OOP topics and questions include:

1. Pillers of OOP
2. Polymorphism
3. Method overloading and overriding
4. Static vs dynamic binding
5. Real-life examples of all above, oral and code based.

DSA questions:

Prepare from geeksforgeeks, almost all the questions being asked from here. Learn time and space complexity.

Know Thy Complexities!

1. Arrays(Dominantly)
2. Recursion
3. LinkedList(Singly, circular most likely)
4. Hashmaps/dictionaries
5. String manipulation(at least one question)
6. Binary search trees
7. Stacks, Queue, Heap(very Less likely)

Algorithms:

1. Merge sort
2. Quicksort
3. Bubble sort

If you want to practice all of the above. Solve this repository. This will cover most of the above.

Spl-Global/SPL-Techincal-Assessment

DataBase:

At least one question in each technical interview.

1. Joins(Must)
2. Normalization (must)
3. Indexing
4. Keys/constraints

How to technical interview:

Do your thinking process loudly. Communicate with the interviewer. Start with sharing the naive, brute force approach and then communicate the optimized approach before start writing code. Share the time and space complexities of both approaches along with approaches. Start with writing pseudo code to convey your thought process to the interviewer, then write code after a green signal from him/her.

Frequently asked questions

1. two sum (less than O(n²) best O(n), use hash)
2. 3Sum (less than O(n³), better O(n²), use hash)
3. Find total rotations in a sorted array
4. Sliding window
5. Sliding window mean
6. Fibonacci series (recursion or dynamic programming(No one asks or mostly know dp))
7. Palindorm, K-Palindorm
8. Match/find substring(e.g: KMP Algorithm )
9. Match/find sub-tree from two given trees.
10. String manipulations
11. Power of a number (in O(n), without build-in operations)
12. Sum of two LinkedList and save into new LinkedList.
13. Extract file name and extension from a given path.
14. Insert Node in a binary tree at a specific position.
15. Spiral Matrix
16. [DB] return 3rd highest salary of the employee

Self-Practice:

To practice yourself, I have already mentioned the above repository. other than that, solve questions on leetcode.

MrAsimZahid/LeetCode

Conclusion:

Best of luck with the interviews. I hope this will help you a lot. Remember in prayers.

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The author is a software engineer with a passion to build meaningful impact-oriented products. He is a Kaggle expert and former AWS educate cloud ambassador, and Google Developer Student Club Lead. He loves to connect with people. If you like his work, Say Hi to him on LinkedIn.

@MrAsimZahid | Research Scientist