My First ever Offline Interview experience with Tekion Corp. SDE
In conversation with Ayush Raj, who has recently made it to Tekion Corp as their full-time SDE. Read this to know all about his Interview Experience with Tekion and his roadmap of preparing..
Hi Ayush, How have you been?
Hey, I have been doing good, Thanks!
Great, So Ayush tell us a bit about yourself.
Sure, so Hey everyone, My name is Ayush Raj and I am a final year student of Bachelors in Computer Science from Lovely Professional University, Punjab. My core competencies lie in Machine learning. To talk about my problem solving skills, I was mediocre in Problem solving until my 2nd year and used to surf the internet for various Free available resources and prepare through them. I always felt my preparations were lacking something and soon in my 3rd year I got introduced to platforms like Programming Pathshala and Geeks for Geeks. Since then, I have been a part of Renaissance by Programming Pathshala and I am soon to join Tekion Corp as their full-time SDE in the month of September’22.
Sounds Amazing Ayush, and how is everyone’s reaction at home to this achievement of yours?
Hahah, honestly they are in a shock themselves that I could crack such a good package on my own. They thought that I might get offers from some service based companies like TCS etc, but when I managed to crack Tekion, they were in shock and happy tears themselves. I had made sure of building my skills over these years and worked upon my consistency due to which I believe I am where I once dreamt of being one day.
Peer pressure and Parents pressure is what we all go through at this stage in our careers so I always kept on building my skills. I even paused my course in the beginning as I wasn’t feeling confident enough but one thing that I never stopped doing was attending all the “Live Lectures” by Vivek and Bharat Bhaiya, I made sure to attend each and every Live class on every weekend to keep my preparations in rhythm and the result speaks for itself today :)
That’s nice Ayush, and how has been your Journey with Renaissance by Programming Pathshala?
It has been amazing, I would like to mention all the 3 co-founders and how they have been of great help to me throughout this course. I got to learn so much from Vivek bhaiya and Bharat bhaiya in terms of the course but the kind of mental peace which I needed sometimes, came directly from Anoop bhaiya. I made sure to attend each and every time he took any session with us students apart from just the teaching classes by the other two Co-Founders. I was able to approach any of them at any given point of time and they would be more than available to help me with my confusion or just to boost my confidence.
And what kept you motivated throughout your journey with Renaissance by Programming Pathshala?
It’s the Human touch to be very honest with you. The way Anoop, Vivek and Bharat bhaiya are always here for us and keeps a check on each and every student of Programming Pathshala, this I believe matters a lot. There comes a time while preparing when a student just starts losing focus and becomes demotivated, I had that phase too but every time I was not active with the course or even when I was , I would receive these notifications from the team of Programming Pathshala asking if everything is going well on my end and if I needed help. These personalized notifications are one thing that I believe I have never seen anywhere else. It kept me motivated every time I thought about giving up with my preparations.
Peer pressure makes one doubt themselves and due to that we tend to run towards different directions while preparing. Some start with Machine learning, while some take up cyber security and many other related fields and somehow move away from our original goal i.e. becoming an SDE. Here, I got help from Anoop bhaiya and his insightful sessions where he told us to never rush into anything and keep working hard towards achieving that dream goal of ours. It is normal to compare ourselves with others but never let this get in the way of you and your journey to becoming an Incredible Software Development Engineer.
I remember not being able to understand “Recursion and Backtracking” initially and Vivek bhaiya was helping me out by texting me personally and giving advice on what should be my strategy to study and how, all this mattered to me very much and I could easily learn Recursion and Backtracking soon enough.
Infact, one of the three questions in my Interview round with Tekion came directly from Renaissance Dashboard, like exactly the same!
That’s Great Ayush, and now coming to your Interview Experience with Tekion, can you throw some light on the same?
Yes, so I had faced 1–2 rejections in the week before my Tekion SDE interview and all of this time I had been able to clear all my technical rounds and got stuck at the HR round. My college LPU and Anoop bhaiya had been of great help to me in cracking the HR rounds, still something was missing it seemed.
When I sat for the Interview with Tekion Corp, I was called in their office and it was my first ever offline Interview experience as the world moved online after coronavirus had hit humanity.
My Interview lasted for a day with 3 different rounds. It started at 11AM and ended by 7–8PM. I had made up my mind that I will take it as “One round at a time”, so every time I was getting shortlisted for the next round of Interview I was happy and felt motivated as I could do it while others could not and I was moving forward. As I was given a pen and paper to code the questions, I did get stuck at many times but the Interviewer was very helpful and nice, they kept telling me to “Go on”, “You’re doing good”, “Nice Approach” etc to help me keep motivated with my code.
There were 2 questions asked from Linked List and Binary search respectively in my first round of Interview and for the second round I had questions related to the project I had mentioned in my resume and one DSA related problem as well.
To my surprise, I did pretty well in the HR round as well. My HR was very impressed by me and said will be in touch even if I do not get selected for the SDE role at Tekion Corp.