IBM Graduate Software Engineer interview questions

Made it as far as the Online Assessment. Two questions only, so pretty fair in that regard, but it meant that 50% of my assessment was contingent on my knowing a lot of SQL queries, which I don't really use past DDL since everything is usually done through the ORM apart from sanity checks, but this SQL question was much more involved than that. I'll also add that SQL wasn't mentioned in the job description I applied for. In the coding question, I couldn't figure out what they actually wanted. I keep reading how other people had questions that were easy or at least straight forward, but the one I had didn't make sense even in the examples they gave and was written rather obtusely. So I was left trying to figure things out from the context of the input arguments and tests. I think I would have figured it out given more time, but 50 minutes and under pressure... Anyway, it was HackerRank, so always remember to hit "submit" whenever you make progress, I forgot to do that after making significant progress on the SQL question. Maybe brush up on your SQL as far as filtering and grouping, calculations and decimal places.

After applying for the job through the portal, I received a Word document ten days later, asking me to answer questions such as "Why you?" and "Why IBM?" as well as providing details about my experience, education, and visa status. I completed the form and sent it back. A few weeks later, I received a phone call asking me to confirm my availability for an on-site interview at IBM’s Mulhuddart campus in Dublin. I confirmed my availability verbally over the phone. Days later, I received an email about an "exploration session," to which I responded, confirming my attendance. On the interview day, I went to the campus, where I found approximately ten other candidates. After a brief introductory session, we were each taken to separate rooms to be interviewed simultaneously by different interviewers. The interview process consisted of two rounds: a managerial round and a technical round. During the managerial round, I was asked behavioral questions such as: "Give me an example of a time when you demonstrated leadership skills." "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague and how you resolved it." In the technical round, I was given two straightforward LeetCode problems: Write a function to return the count of odd and even numbers in a given range (start and end). Write a function to find the maximum number of consecutive ones in a binary array. Additionally, I was asked some standard computer science questions about relational databases, version control systems, and object-oriented programming concepts. Overall, the interview went smoothly, and I felt I performed well. However, I received a rejection email two weeks later.