Round 1
Questions: Specific question not provided.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2
Questions:
- VPNs: Explain the differences between personal and enterprise-level VPNs, and describe the detailed workings of VPNs, including tunneling protocols, encryption, and authentication mechanisms.
- IP Addresses: Discuss implementations and scenarios involving IP addresses, covering differences between IPv4 and IPv6, their addressing schemes, and requirements.
- OSI Model: Questions related to the OSI model, including protocols like DNS and DHCP, and their functions within the model.
- Security: Explain Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and the principles behind asymmetric encryption.
- Smart Pointers: Explain smart pointers and their benefits over traditional pointers.
- DSA Question: Generate all possible palindromes from two strings and find the longest and lexicographically smallest one.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate initially misunderstood the DSA problem, which led to taking more time to solve it. However, they managed to answer the other questions with good flow once settled.
Interviewer's Feedback
Overall positive feedback; the interviewer was impressed by the candidate's knowledge of smart pointers. The only critique was the extra time taken to solve the DSA question, which limited the coverage of additional questions.
Round 3
Questions:
- Request/Response Troubleshooting: How would you determine if a machine is down or if the port you sent a request to is not working when there is no response?
- Pointer Arithmetic: How would you check if a particular byte is set using pointer arithmetic?
- ARP Protocol: In-depth question related to ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) working.
- Three-Way Handshake & TLS Handshake: Explain the Three-Way Handshake protocol and extend the discussion to the TLS Handshake protocol.
- TCP vs. UDP: Discuss the differences between TCP and UDP, including their applications and appropriate use cases.
- OOP Concepts: Implement various OOP concepts such as inheritance, polymorphism, virtual functions, and function overloading.
- DSA Question: Problem similar to the Asteroid Collision and a question about finding the number of strings of length n formed using characters a, e, i, o, u with specific adjacency constraints.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate initially struggled with complex approaches but became more settled as the interview progressed. They effectively answered most networking and OOP-related questions.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer seemed satisfied with the candidate's responses, especially regarding networking and OOP concepts, despite initial struggles with simpler questions.
Round 4
Questions:
- HTTP vs. HTTPS and TLS Handshake: Explain the differences between HTTP and HTTPS. How does a TLS handshake work?
- Calling of main() Function: Who calls the main() function, and what happens during the compilation and interpretation of a program?
- Threads vs. Processes: Discuss threads and processes in depth. Is there thread scheduling or process scheduling?
- Memory Architecture of a Process: Discuss the memory architecture of a process in depth.
- OOP Concepts: Explain OOP concepts in depth, including abstraction and security aspects.
- DSA Question: Implement a solution for a queue problem where the print function was required for the nth state.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate provided four approaches for the queue problem, explaining the trade-offs of each. They struggled with the questions on processes and threads but managed to recover by providing examples.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer appeared frustrated with the candidate's initial struggles but was impressed by the multiple approaches presented for the queue problem.
Additional Topics Discussed
- Multithreading in C
- C Language Specifics: pointers, data structures, map implementation
- Process vs. Thread
- Memory Architecture
- Multiprogramming scenarios
- C++ Specifics: compilation process, mutexes
- Network Protocols and OSI model
- Memory Management and architecture specifics
- Differences between i = i + 1 and i++
Verdict: I was selected!