SAP Labs visited our university around the first week of August. Our University was offered with Scholar program. According to this program, the scholars besides working at SAP Labs from Monday to Friday will also be offered an M.TECH from BITS Pilani on Saturday. This was completely sponsored by the company itself. The M.TECH classes will be on campus, and the professors from BITS will be there at the SAP Labs campus.

So, there were 4 rounds in the process:

1. Online coding test
2. Technical Interview 1
3. Technical Interview 2
4. HR

Online coding round:

It was on August 2nd, 2023. It was a 45-minute test. There were 2 coding questions. One was easy and the other was medium. It took me 6 minutes to solve the first and 30 mins to solve the second. There were 10 test cases for the first one and all were passed at one go. For the second one only 7/10 test cases passed even after checking my code for multiple times so it took me 30 minutes. Then I didn’t want to take it till the last minute so I just submitted it when 5 mins were left.

We received the result a week later and 2 days before the Interview over email. I cleared the test successfully.

Both the technical interviews were scheduled on the same day. First round was in the morning from 8 AM. The second one was in the afternoon from 2 PM.

Technical Interview 1:

It was on Aug 10th 2023. We were asked to join the meeting at 8 am. First there was an orientation session for an hour which was followed by interview. My Interview was started at 9:15 and went on for 30 minutes. It was started by an Introduction where my Interviewer gave a short note on what they do and then asked me to brief about myself. Later as we moved on to the technical questions, the first ones were to write a code in any language that I was comfortable with.

1. To write a code to swap two numbers with and without using a temp variable.

2. Palindrome

3. To reverse the string. (Basically they asked me to reverse the list of characters in my name)

This was live coding.

Then I was asked 2 puzzle questions:

1. Water Jug problem: There were 2 jugs given to you with no measurements. One is 3 Lt and the other is 5 Lt. How do you measure 4 Lt water from those.

2. There’s a pond and with each passing day the number of lotus in the pond gets doubled. On 15th day the pond gets completely filled. When was the pond exactly half filled with lotus.

After this, the Interviewer asked me if I have any questions for them. I asked few. I was able to answer all the questions and hence received an email at 1 pm saying I have been selected for round 2 which was on the same day.

Technical Interview 2:

The meet was started at 2 pm and my Interview started at 3pm and went on for 45 mins. This was also started with brief Introduction. Then the Interviewer jumped onto DSA. I was asked few questions like:

• What is binary search and write its code. (In any language)
• What are various sorting algorithms and which one is the best.
• What is the difference between Merge sort and Quick sort. Which is better and why.
• What is the difference between bubble sort and Insertion sort. Which is the better one and why.
• What is a Binary search tree and write code for Insertion in a BST. (In any language)

I was able to answer all. If you do not know the complete code then let them know the concept behind it in theory and write pseudo code at least ????

Then he asked me about my areas of interest and I said machine learning, front end development, cloud computing and cyber security. He asked me questions from each of these so make sure you don’t say something during the Interview that you have no idea about nor mention it in resume ????

• Chat GPT uses which algorithm? We had quite a few minutes of discussion on this.
• If you have to design a software, tell me the process of what you do from start till the end.
• What is cloud?
• What do you mean by pay as you go?
• What is AAA? (cyber security)
• What are the various threats that usually occur?

Then a few resume based questions were asked regarding my certifications and Internships, they were all straight and simple. Then he asked me if I was familiar with DBMS and Operating systems. I said yes. He asked me few questions like:

• What are ACID properties.
• What is Normalisation and its types.
• What is the difference between Recovery and Restoration in a database.

There were two more which I cannot recall but all were easy.

Then finally he asked me if I have any questions for him. I asked a few like: What is expected from us in the first month at SAP; Is there any criteria for the conversion post M.TECH and a few more. He was quite satisfied by all the answers and gave me a positive feedback. I received an email that I was selected for the next round at 8 pm on the same day.

HR round:

It was scheduled on the next day morning, August 11th, 2023. My interview started around 11 am and went on for 30 mins.

This was also started with a brief introduction. Then the HR asked me:

1. What are the 3 best projects that you have done till date and what were the challenges you faced during the process?
2. Why do you want to join SAP Labs?
3. What are your strengths?
4. Scenario-based question: You are in a team which consists of 3 people and a team lead. The team lead isn’t assigning you any tasks from 3 weeks. The two others were getting to do the work. How will you handle such a situation?
5. How do you handle pressure?
6. Will you be able to manage both work as well as M.TECH classes? How?

Finally he asked if I had any questions for him and I asked a few. I got an email saying I cleared my HR round as well on the same day at 8 pm.

I was very confident throughout and if I do not know the exact answer, instead of speaking anything random or saying I don’t know, I gave an explanation about what ever I knew on the topic or writing a pseudo code instead of code for coding ????

Tips:

• Dress neatly and professionally
• Smile and be confident
• Answer all the questions without saying I have no idea
• Speak fluent
• Do not overdo anything, keep your answers short and precise
• Do not forget to ask 2-4 questions at the end