Excitation phase | Interview with Exterro Inc.

It all started the day following the last exam of the last semester. The whole class was asked to take part in an intensive training in order to be equipped well enough to attend the exterro interview.

The first day was 22-12-14. It was a Monday and we were asked to bring all our things to stay in the hostel till the end of the training. I had my baggage ready and went to college at the usual time. Our class was assigned a classroom at the top floor. I took the last seat and it was fun to be at the last.

Then Parthiban took over. He segregated the students based on whether they want java or c++. I selected Java and we began our training in the communication lab.

The training went on for 4 days and it was followed by the interview on Friday. We all were asked to come in blazers. The first round was an aptitude test. The java questions were really a little tough to answer but the aptitude was fun except the time constraint.

I was shortlisted for the next round – the GD. There were a total of 27 students selected for the group discussion.

The GD took place in three sessions with 9 students for each session. I was in the second nine. And finally my chance came; the topic given to us was web browsers. I started the discussion and made some good points. I was sure I would be shortlisted for the next round and I was.

The next was the technical and I was second in order to the interview. Kumar was the first and they interviewed him for about 10 minutes. Then I went in.

I was asked a brief introduction about myself. The first few questions were about my interests in design and development. They probed me to find out my real interest whether it was design or development. I told them about the flash applications.

 Then they went on to ask about SSL which I managed to give a short answer. They told me that they were tempted to ask that question because of my interest in web technology. I said that by web technology I just meant html and stuffs.

Then they asked about get and post methods to which I gave a fairly good answer. The next question was on interfaces. I gave my best explanation. And finally they came to this question which they stated was a tricky one. If given an offer immediately would I choose Exterro or Aspire Systems?

I said I would choose Exterro stating my interest in a product based company. That was the end of my technical interview.

After the technical interview, 7 candidates were shortlisted to do a task from the company in 3 days. I was one among them. The task was to develop a Java web application which involved servlets, java script, css and sql.

We were given 3 days to complete the task and I was very sure of completing the task in 2 days and dedicating the entire third day for decorating my work. But it was easier said. Learning the basics of servlets and JSP took the whole duration and only when we were close to the deadline, we literally started our project.

We should have submitted the task by 6.00 pm and I was coding at full speed at the last hour. I had all the functionalities of one module ready but not the other one. Fortunately we were all given an extension till the end of that day. That meant an additional 6 hours of oxygen.

I completed my task by about 08.00 pm. Well, that was about 2 hours late but my work was complete at least. We all sent the task by mail at about 11.30 pm.

Only after two days on the New Year day, I came to know that I was shortlisted for the next round along with 3 others. Thus I learnt that the three rounds of shortlisting and the daunting task was not all.  

On 02.01.15, the day after the New Year we four were asked to come to the Tidel Park, at Exterro R&D Coimbatore for the second set of rounds of the Interview Process.

The start was great. It was an early day and I woke up at 04.00 am and got ready by 04.30 when Nantha Kumar came to my room. He, his brother and me were riding his bike to the Trichengode bus stand. Then took place the most interesting part of the journey.

The fuel got empty when we were not even a mile away from where we started. A man who passed us advised us to buy a liter of fuel from a local vendor and travel till the next fuel station. But Nantha didn’t heed him and wanted to try his luck more. He just put the vehicle down on the road and waited for the last drops of fuel to enter the engine.

After about 5 minutes, he started the bike again and we were able to reach our college 3 km away from my room and we had to go another mile to reach the fuel station. We just pushed the bike and were walking on the road at about 04.45 am early in the morning when the whole place was peacefully sleeping. The worst part was I started sweating due to the high physical activity. Thankfully, the atmosphere was chill and I was not sweating too much. Looks does matter after all!

The drama was finally over, when his brother got the bike started and he went ahead of us to reach the fuel station. He filled it and took us to the Tiruchengode Bus Stand. We were there at about 5.00am. We took a bus to Erode and then from there to Coimbatore.

Finally we reached Tidel Park at about 08.00 am. We were not let inside by the watchmen as we were not holding any ID cards. We called Exterro and they asked the watchmen to let us inside for the Interview and we all were asked to wait in the food court till 09.00am.

We were inside the company at about 09.30 am and the interview process started. One of us was called for the technical interview and I took the chance because I hated to wait long. I went in. The interviewer was the same one I had met in the technical round at college earlier. He asked me about the task and what I learnt out of it.

I gave a convincing answer and mentioned that I learnt JSP, servlet etc to which he said the use of JSP is not advisable because of the number of times of compilation required for displaying JSP pages. Then he gave me his laptop and asked me to code a java servlet to print the current date and time. He had already opened the eclipse JDK for me and I could see my task in the tabs. I just came up with some wild guesses on the name of the function. Even though I couldn’t decide on the right one over the choices provided by the drop down, he helped me with the one he expected.

He then asked me to code a program that gets the users name on one page and prints it with a “hi” on the next one. That was kid stuff. He then asked me a few questions regarding some concepts in java servlets. I was much new to java servlets and he knew that so he was pretty ok with the rather unclear answers that I gave. And finally he asked the advantages of using java servlets instead of JSP for which I don’t remember giving a sharp answer either. Nevertheless, he told me the right answer. I promptly said that I didn’t know it. And the interview was over just like that.

The next round was with the HR, Mr. Karthik Subramaniam. His interview was more personal. He just got me to tell about my family background and about my story of having ended up in a college in salem after completing schooling in Chennai. I also told him about the CEED exam that I had taken and I wouldn’t be able to join the company if I ever got a chance to do higher studies in IIT. He agreed and asked me to wait for the next round.

After lunch at the IT park’s food court, I was called in for the next round of interview with another HR. He also had some usual set of ice breaking questions like brief introductions and stuffs like that but he was quite cordial. He then asked me to rate myself on a scale of 1-10 on my java knowledge. I said 8. And then he came up with a really good question. He asked,”So you know the object oriented concepts?”. I nodded. He continued,”Just tell me which one of those concepts is used in the system.out.println statement.” That looks simple on the surface but I could not cut through it. I just tried my luck,”Inheritance??”. He didn’t say yes or no but just asked me how. That how made me think like maybe I was right. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I just gave a weird justification for my answer. He just smiled and said, “It’s polymorphism”. Looking at my puzzled face he went on, “because the println function works for int or a string or a character etc”. That’s when I deduced that he has got some really strong programming basics and I shouldn’t take HRs lightly. He then asked, “still you rate yourself at 8?”. But I didn’t give in. I retorted,”Sir, Maybe I didn’t know the OOPs concept behind the println statement but that is not going to stop me from using those functions efficiently in my programs.”. He smiled in approval.

He went on to ask about my short term and long term goals for which I gave fairly good answers. And he also asked how many years I would commit to Exterro if I am selected. I don’t know why I was that miserly, I just said 1. That too with a hesitation. But that didn’t make any difference.

The final round was with the Executive Director of India operations. She was portrayed to be someone so strict and I was a little nervous. But frankly, she didn’t seem so and was very cordial when she interviewed me. She just asked me when would I get my IIT results and I replied that by January 15. She told me that she wanted to give me an internship immediately but as I was also having other plans, she asked me to convey my result once I get it.

PS: Things took wild turns after that and eventually I didn’t get to work there even though my result was not as I expected it to be. Now, even my decision of not taking the offer immediately seems to be the best possible because I got to experience so many things just because I was free.