My Placement Diary: Chapter III

After MuSigma and Deloitte had hit me bad, I had lost the verve for preparing for any company. But in spite of that we had to attend training classes, domain classes and then ‘special’ training classes; and that was all that went throughout the other month. No companies visiting us. And for a long period of time, I was pretty slackened about the placement stuff. That one month, we had absolutely nothing to do, which could have been used by me for preparing for the better companies which were to visit us, but all I did was nothing. At around 10^th or 12^th August, we had a company ‘ZYCUS’ visiting us. I had never ever heard of this name before. But anyway it had a package of about 3.8 LPA so it was considered as ‘not a bad one’. Though I had no plans of getting through this one, I could clear both the aptitude and coding round.

“Wasn’t she saying that she doesn’t want it? Huh! Everyone wants it but they just pretend that they won’t give their 100 percent. Typical placement story!”

Aah! I shrug these negative people off. I never stopped anyone, not that companies have a fixed number to take, perform well and you’ll get it.

So, now that I’d been shortlisted for the interview, and that I genuinely wasn’t much interested, I was pretty chilled about it. No stress, no looking for what they’ll be asking or what the company is about. They were taking really long interviews and at around 2:00 am, my name was called, I remember I was wearing flats with my formal salwar suit. I wasn’t prepared for this one, at all. The guy who was interviewing me must be in his late 20s. As it started off, his first question was, “State rank 1 in English Olympiad, why didn’t you rather pursue Arts?” I really wanted to, but my Dad always wanted me to be an Engineer, not that it was a pressure but I kept his words and here I am. Then he just went on with my extra-curricular activities; what was your toughest debate topic, what did you speak, what all do you write, whose blog do you follow etc etc. Then he gave me a puzzle which I guess I’d done a few days back so it took me no time to solve it. Next was testing my coding skills, “a pattern printing question”. How I hate pattern printing question. Why we can’t we just do this, "printf("*\n**\n***\n****");". Less space and time complexity. Anyway, I somehow managed to give him a solution. When asked to optimize it, I have no idea from where did that come to my mind and I gave him a logic related to ARRAYS. Well he just said that same question may have different approaches and took the sheet back. So, a few more out of my subject questions followed that and after that I was done. The results were supposed to come the next morning but they didn’t, probably some issues with the interview panel. After about a week I got to know that they recruited like four students (excluding me, of course).

Next up, we had ThoughtWorks, which is a really good one especially if you’re really passionate about coding, at least that’s what the notice on the portal said. Also adding to that was the 6.23 LPA package. I knew this wasn’t meant for me and that the fact it had several coding rounds, made me believe that I’d be back to my hostel after the first round itself. The day came, and we had our first round where a problem statement was given and we were supposed to write the code in any language of our preference and run the test cases for the same. As soon as I was done writing the code, I compiled and ran it, with an output of:

“O% test cases successful”

Anyway, I made a few changes and to my surprise this time, it showed:

“40% test cases successful”

I wasn’t really expecting this, I knew what changes made next would make it run 100% but I didn’t have that much of time left. After the test, I heard few of them had a 100% score and most of them couldn’t do it so I thought maybe I have a chance. And yes I did, I got through the first round. Again, the second round went well and I cleared that one too. It is so ironic, the places where you’re sure of hitting the target, do not exist and the places you’ve never ever thought of, magically appear.

After clearing two rounds of the process, when I went for the third one, we got a pretty big problem statement with each one assigned to a mentor. I had always enjoyed doing this part, when the problem statement isn’t much about the jargons of coding and are rather more about logics. So, I was able to complete my code and run all the cases as well. My mentor kept asking me to optimize my code and I kept doing as much as I could and I remember optimizing it to 102 lines of code. So, I was positive that I might get selected but then again it depended on how many are they going to shortlist. Sadly, they took 14/50 and hence my name wasn’t there. I wasn’t disheartened at all rather I was happy that I had managed to make it till here. It sure fostered my self-confidence.

When I came back to my room and lied down, there was just one sad feeling of going through the same procedure again in my future and that I was still unplaced. I had developed a hatred against wearing those formals and getting ready for written tests and interviews. But then again, after those one and a half months, I sure had gained a lot about what placement tastes like, what interviews sound like and what rejections felt like. None of it had even a pinch of likeable factor for me. But I was still looking forward to positivity…