6.2LPA to 21LPA - A Journey of Mechanical Engineer from SBC to Product
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In the recent news of layoff I think it would be the perfect time to write my story to give everyone something to look on the (not so) brighter side.
My story: Graduated in 2022 from a T2.5 engineering college with a mechanical Engineering degree and a campus placement with Cognizant as GenC developer. I was trained in .net full stack as intern and joined as full time(Aug 2022). And to my fortune I wasn't given any work for the first 2.5 years(till march 2025), I realized this at the 1 year mark and started studying Java and Springboot on my own, and also started doing Leetcode. And comes March 2025 and as expected i was moved to bench. I then went on to clearing 3 rounds of Java+Angular Interviews in the next 1 week and thanks to my hiring manager who was ready to overlook my lack of hands on experience and gave me a shot. I worked there till last month and quickly went to be critical resource(lol, my colleagues were that bad).
Now I don't want this to be a low effort flex post and want to actually provide some inputs.
I will be giving how different companies interview candidates for Java specific roles as mid level software engineer
WITCH:
I attended interviews with Accenture, HCL, LTM(LTIMindtree previously), TCS and they usually have 2 rounds (if necessary client rounds) and you can expect theoretical questions from Topics like JDK,JVM,JRE(low priority) Multithreading, Springboot annotations, Spring security, Java 8/11/17 features, SQL index, joins, some questions regarding optimization. Then stream API problems (try to cover with Student class,Employee class and questions with hashmap and groupingBy)
GCC/Product/Upper level SBC
EPAM : longest prefix, second largest in array, SQL joins & indexes, try-with-resources, Mockito assertions, partitioning, abstract vs interface, terminal vs intermediate streams, HashMap vs Hashtable, ArrayList vs LinkedList, Cloneable, immutable class, object creation, BFS on binary tree, path variable vs request param, stereotype annotations, application.properties vs application-dev.properties, design a chatbot(basic).
EPAM is notorious for conducting several rounds and long interviews but they tend to focus a lot on Java Core and Springboot internals. Also will have to write code in their platform and run. Problems can be on easy/med level DSA or stream API
UPS:
R1: Second largest number and First non repeating char in insertion order using stream API and then Java, Springboot standard questions
R2: 2 people from USA, mostly around discussion around designing scalable systems, how to optimize query, how to optimize largest dataset retrieval , horizontal vs vertical scaling, some discussion around message queues, Checking logs, deployment and a Code review
Atheanahealth:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7779031/athenahealth-mts-chennai-selected-by-ano-329k/
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7612993/athenahealth-mts-chennai-by-anonymous_us-d7xw/
BNP Paribas:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7610904/bnp-paribas-chennai-by-anonymous_user-e1bi/
Final closing thoughts: You don't have to answer all the questions with perfection or need to know all the answers, being confident goes a long way. Some of my system design were wrong, some of my dsa coding were wrong, but they bought my explanation. Hiring managers were impressed with leetcode and github profile. (solve ~800 in leetcode), one manager in Deloitte asked to try for FAANG and asked not to join here :P
Resources for Java and Sprignboot Interview focused: sumit java ebook, makakmayum java ebook, code period channel for streams api coding, lot of java interview experience, coding odyssey medium articles and chatgpt for references all this should be more than enough to crack any java springboot interview
Feel free to ask any questions! Happy to answer!