MS SCHOLARS FACED IN PLACEMENT INTERVIEWS IN 1994 AND 1995
Wipinfo has 2 rounds of interviews. The first round is fully technical.The
second round, depending on the members of the board, may betechnical,semi-technical
or personal. Last year the second round was moretechnical than the first(!)
and the board was headed by Mr. P.V.Sanjeeva Reddy, one of the no-nonsense,
hardcore-technical, project leaders in Infotech. This year it was headed by
Mr. Victor Jayakiran, G.M.(Technical, Global R&D) who was a much sober man
and therefore spent most of the time in the second round dealing with personal
questions.
I detail here the technical questions asked in the first round --
[1] Tell us about your work in brief.
My
Ans. Mention first the title, followed by a brief overview of the work, what
we plan to achieve, what has been achieved so far, finallythe relevance/scope
of the work to the related area (i.e. how is it going to be useful). [ 5-10
mins. depending on interest of the listener.]
[2..n] Questions related to the work. Ans. Area dependent. [ 10 mins ]
[n+1] Tell us what you know about DMA and why that is needed?
My
Ans. As usual, mentioned the wastage of CPU computation power spent in
busy-waiting. Told how DMA
works.
[n+2] What are the various types of scheduling algo, what is used by UNIX?
My Ans. Mentioned Round Robin, First-come-first-served, Shortest-job-first,
Earliest-deadline-first, Least-laxity-first,Priority-based-event-driven. UNIX
uses RR with multi-level feedback.
[n+3] How can you implement SJF in UNIX?
My Ans. Usually, SJF means that we know the job-duration in advance. In UNIX
where we cannot know that, we have to make assumptions about that based on
which we should initially schedule. Periodically however, we
have to fine-tune our initial assumptions based on the times taken by various
ready jobs, and recompute estimates and change the schedule accordingly.
[n+4] Different types of subroutine calling conventions?
My Ans. Call by value, reference, value-result.[n+5] Parameter passing
sequence used by C?
My Ans. Rightmost parameter pushed first on stack.[n+6] What is a page-fault
and how is it handled in UNIX?
My Ans. [Refer to MJBach, Ch. 9 for details].
Personal questions in the first round
1. What was your overall position in the Univ. in B.E.
2. Why did you choose to join MS here.
3. How do you like the MS course.
4. Anything you want to know about us.
Technical Questions in the second round
[1]
What are the current trends and areas of focus in IT.
My Ans. Talked about emerging trends of S/W Engg and ISO 9000 stuff (gave
vague ideas about them as I don't know much nor do I care about these topics
myself ;-)). Then mentioned the proliferation of O-O methodologies and their
usefulness in speeding up development process, code re-usability, ease of
maintenance, ease of bug-fixing. Thirdly, mentioned the work going on in
High-Speed N/w - FDDI, ATM, Fast-Ethernet(100Mbps). Told whatever little I
knew about ATM in response to another question.
[2] What is a Micro-Kernel architecture.
My Ans. This is a developing area in OSs where instead of building the kernel
as a single monolithic structure starting from scratch, it is built as a set
of layers. The micro-kernel provides only the bare-bones like
Device-drivers,
rudimentary filesystem support etc. on which, depending on the intended area
of application of the OS, it can be customized to provide various higher level
OS features like
Multiprocessing, IPC, etc.
Personal Questions in the second round
1. Tell us about yourself, your background.
2. What does your father do currently.
3. Your performance in schooling, B.E.
4. Your +/- points.
5. Why do you think Wipro should take you.
6. What qualities do you have that make you a person suitable for going
into the IT industry (a corollary to the previous question).
7. What do your friends opine about you.
8. When do you think you will complete and be able to join.
9. How can you assure that you will join by that time.
10. Anything you want to know about us.
Wipro Infotech
FIRST INTERVIEW:(First the interviewer asked me to name two favorite subjects
- OS and Networks)
a) Describe the memory management policies in Unix. How is paging implemented?
How page faults are handled?
Seems
to be a favorite question for these chaps ---- Maurice Bach.
b)
Write a macro in C for swapping two nibbles in a byte.Use the shift operators
and be careful while defining
temporary variables( if you do so) as you have to write a macro. Otherwise it
is pretty simple.
c) What is the CPU-scheduling policy in Unix? - Round robin scheduling with
multilevel queues.
d) Diffrence between short term, long term and medium term scheduler.First two
should be peaceful. The last one
is also known as swapper. (See Taenenbaum and/or Peterson)
e) Name various page-replacement policies. Which can be implemented both with
and without pre-emption? - see
Peterson.
f) Describe the Sliding window protocol. What is it's advantage over
stop-and-wait? - Saves bandwidth.
(Taenenbaum
please)
2ND INTERVIEW (Both personal and technical interleaved)
a) Tell us something about yourself.
b) Aren't you going for higher studies abroad? Why?
c) Rank and CGPA. MSites do not have ranks but still they wanted to know my
approx position in my batch.
Shady question. It is your job to convince them that for MS,
grades do not hold any meaning.
d) What is re-entrant code? --- Non-self modifying code. Can be shared
by many processes simultaneously.
Gave e.g. of text-editors like 'vi'. Counter Q: But then no code modifies
itself. What does 'non-self modifying'
mean? ---- I don't know for sure.
e) Diff between compilers and interpreters. Some fundaes about how to link
code in different files.
f) What would your friends tell us about you if we ask them? Standard question
for everyone.
Company: Motorola (came in August'95) Just one question: When do you expect to
finish? ---By August'96
That is too late. We are looking for guys who finish by Jan'96. Pl. apply a
month before you
submit your thesis. Thank you very much.
WIPRO INFOTECH Ltd.
I don't think there's anything to be said about these giants. Only thing
is, Wipro is not into the holidays business. I firmly believe that joining
Wipro will further your student-like life for a few more years, and if you are
really raring to get into the corporate line of jobs, then Wipro is not for
you. When I say Wipro above, I mean Infotech. Wipro Systems is one of the more
Pseud-ish companies, what with their formal attire, replete with Tie and
associated
appurtenances of a western lifestyle. Both Wipro-s have a very good pay, and
*sure-shot* revisions once a year, where you do end up getting at least a 20%
hike, usually. Don't quote me, however. This is strictly off the records.