Interviewing with Hummingwave Technologies for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) position was one of the most enriching technical discussions I’ve had so far. The interview lasted around 50–55 minutes and covered a spectrum of topics — from fundamental OOP concepts and database management to a deep, detailed discussion around the projects on my resume. ### I’m happy to share that the experience went well, and I ultimately secured the offer. Here’s a detailed walkthrough of the interview. # The Process The interview began with a short personal introduction from both sides. I was asked to walk the interviewer through my background, technical interests, and key projects. This quickly set the tone for a conversation that was both technical and exploratory. ## 1. Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) A significant portion of the early interview revolved around OOP. The interviewer focused more on conceptual clarity and practical usage than theoretical memorization. mutiple question were asked based on class, Object,and overal OOPs concept. ## 2. Database Management Systems (DBMS) Though not the primary focus, the interview did assess my understanding of database fundamentals and real-world data design. # Deep Dive into My Projects This was the longest and most detailed segment of the interview. The interviewer wanted to understand the depth of my involvement, my problem-solving approach, and the reasoning behind my technical decisions. ## A. Plant Recognition System ###Questions What dataset did you use and how did you prepare it? Why did you choose your specific model architecture? How did you handle class imbalance? If accuracy drops under low-light conditions, how would you improve robustness? How would you reduce inference time without significantly affecting accuracy? ## B. Movie Recommendation System Did you use collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, or a hybrid approach? What features did you extract? How did you compute similarity between users or movies? How do you measure the performance of a recommender system? How would you solve the cold-start problem for new users? How would you scale the recommendation pipeline as data volume grows? ## C. Camouflaged Object Detection This project attracted special attention due to its complexity and uniqueness. ### Questions : What makes camouflaged object detection a challenging task? Which model architecture did you use? How did you evaluate model performance? If objects blend almost perfectly with their surroundings, how can the model be improved? How would you adapt your model for real-time video detection? ### I think they were evaluating my understanding of model optimization, domain challenges, data processing, and deployment considerations. This is the end of questions. The interview concluded with a short discussion about: My preferred tech stack How I usually debug issues My willingness to learn new tools and adapt They also allowed me to ask questions about the role, team structure, and company culture. # Final Result After some days, I received the confirmation that I had been selected for the SDE role at Hummingwave Technologies. The interview was well-structured, conversational, and intellectually engaging. ### What stood out most was the company’s emphasis on understanding thought process over memorized answers. This experience circulated around the importance of strong fundamentals combined with practical, hands-on project knowledge.

## I am sharing my interview experience with ICICI from last year -2025. I applied it through my campus placement drive as a fresher. ### ICICI came to IIT Delhi's placement season 2024–2025. It was listed as an ICICI Manager I. Manager I is a grade. It was open for all departments with no minimum CGPA criteria. # My profile at that time: I had an intern at a startup where I had built a recommendation model. I had been grinding LeetCode and Codeforces along with machine learning. I had successfully completed Andrew Ng's specialization course on ML and deep learning and practiced on Kaggle. # Online Assessment — 60 minutes At first we have CV shortlisting, where I got shortlisted. After that, I have to give an online assessment that contains only MCQ questions related to OOPs, DSA, Cpp, Java, and Python, which I successfully cleared. After that, I got a call from the placement cell that I have to give a personality test called personality profiler, where they asked me about how I will behave or react under some given conditions. Update 1—The interview shortlist comes on 30th November around 5 pm. Update 2—The interview was scheduled on the morning of 3rd December # Interview: It was 9 in the morning; the atmosphere was quite foggy and cold, and I was quite nervous. The interview is going to be the only one round with both technical and HR at the same time. ## They called me for Interview First question: “Tell about yourself.” I had prepared for this question and told about my name, my hometown, and my specializations along with my hobbies. Second question: “Explain any one of your projects.” I know this question will pop up, and I had prepared for this question by preparing my best project in depth. But as ICICI is a bank, I thought I should explain my project, which is relevant to the bank in any way. So instead of explaining about the project ‘AI Interviewer,’ I choose stock analysis by AI agent. I had been asked some cross questions regarding my project, which I answered successfully. Third Question: “Can you optimize the time taken to train ANN?” As there are many ways to optimize artificial neural networks. It starts with the hardware side, like using more powerful GPUs. Then I explained we can drop neurons in order to train the model faster. Then he asked me about some mathematical approaches, so I recalled Adam optimization, and I explained it in detail by drawing some formulas and images. Fourth question: “Forward and Back Propagation.” I started with forward propagation by considering a 2-layer neural network and similarly derived back propagation from it, which he seems satisfied with. ## Update 3 — Now my technical round is over and its for HR round 5. She asked me about why ICICI, my background, my future goals, and general HR questions, which I prepared before the interview and answered optimally, at least according to me. Update 4: I got a call from POC that they were willing to offer me, which I gladly accepted. I felt a surge of excitement and joy. Update 5: HR called me and congratulated me, after which we had a professional handshake and goodbye. 3rd December 2024 will be a special day for me as I get my first job. It was my first and last interview at IIT Delhi. Thanks for reading.

### Note that the interview was for SDE intern role when I was in my 3rd year. # Technical Test: 1. There were some aptitude questions and basic CS questions 2. There were coding questions. Everyone had got different questions. ### My questions were - • Add a node to end of the linked list. • Print fibonacci sequence. ( the question was more complicated and they had given it in terms of binary tree). ## 4 students were shortlisted for the interview round # Technical Interview round - He started to ask OS questions (about threads). I said I do not know since the course is not completed. - He asked questions about C. what are static variables? Where are they stored? Where are global variables stored? # Manegarial interview round - discussed about the projects on my resume. - Asked to design a cache.