WIPRO 1995

THIS FILE CONTAINS THE QUESTIONS WHICH MS SCHOLARS FACED IN PLACEMENT

Company name: Wipro Infotech Ltd., Bangalore.
Year: 1995

Wipinfo has 2 rounds of interviews.
The first round is fully technical.

The second round, depending on the members of the board, may be technical,semi-technical or personal. Last year the second round was more technical than the first(!) and the board was headed by Mr. P.V.Sanjeeva Reddy, one of the no-nonsense, hardcore-technical, project leaders
in Infotech. This year it was headed by Mr. Victor Jayakiran, G.M.(Technical, Global R&D) who was a much sober man and therefore spent most of the time in the second round dealing with personal questions.

I detail here the technical questions asked in the first round --
--------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Tell us about your work in brief.
My Ans. Mention first the title, followed by a brief overview of the
work, what we plan to achieve, what has been achieved so far, finally
the relevance/scope of the work to the related area (i.e. how is it
going to be useful). [ 5-10 mins. depending on interest of the
listener.]

[2..n] Questions related to the work.
Ans. Area dependent. [ ~ 10 mins ]

[n+1] Tell us what you know about DMA and why that is needed?
My Ans. As usual, mentioned the wastage of CPU computation power spent
in busy-waiting. Told how DMA works.

[n+2] What are the various types of scheduling algo, what is used by
UNIX?
My Ans. Mentioned Round Robin, First-come-first-served,
Shortest-job-first, Earliest-deadline-first, Least-laxity-first,
Priority-based-event-driven. UNIX uses RR with multi-level feedback.

[n+3] How can you implement SJF in UNIX?
My Ans. Usually, SJF means that we know the job-duration in advance. In
UNIX where we cannot know that, we have to make assumptions about that
based on which we should initially schedule. Periodically however, we
have to fine-tune our initial assumptions based on the times taken by
various ready jobs, and recompute estimates and change the schedule
accordingly.

[n+4] Different types of subroutine calling conventions?
My Ans. Call by value, reference, value-result.

[n+5] Parameter passing sequence used by C?
My Ans. Rightmost parameter pushed first on stack.

[n+6] What is a page-fault and how is it handled in UNIX?
My Ans. [Refer to MJBach, Ch. 9 for details].

Personal questions in the first round --
-------------------------------------

1. What was your overall position in the Univ. in B.E.
2. Why did you choose to join MS here.
3. How do you like the MS course.
4. Anything you want to know about us.

Technical Questions in the second round --
---------------------------------------

[1] What are the current trends and areas of focus in IT.
My Ans. Talked about emerging trends of S/W Engg and ISO 9000 stuff
(gave vague ideas about them as I don't know much nor do I care
about these topics myself ;-)). Then mentioned the proliferation of O-O
methodologies and their usefulness in speeding up development process,
code re-usability, ease of maintenance, ease of bug-fixing.
Thirdly, mentioned the work going on in High-Speed N/w - FDDI, ATM,
Fast-Ethernet(100Mbps). Told whatever little I knew about ATM in
response to another question.

[2] What is a Micro-Kernel architecture.
My Ans. This is a developing area in OSs where instead of building the
kernel as a single monolithic structure starting from scratch, it is
built as a set of layers. The micro-kernel provides only the bare-bones
like Device-drivers, rudimentary filesystem support etc. on which,
depending on the intended area of application of the OS, it can be
customized to provide various higher level OS features like
Multiprocessing, IPC, etc.

Personal Questions in the second round --
--------------------------------------

1. Tell us about yourself, your background.
2. What does your father do currently.
3. Your performance in schooling, B.E.
4. Your +/- points.
5. Why do you think Wipro should take you.
6. What qualities do you have that make you a person suitable for going
into the IT industry (a corollary to the previous question).
7. What do your friends opine about you.
8. When do you think you will complete and be able to join.
9. How can you assure that you will join by that time.
10. Anything you want to know about us.



Name: G.Kartik
Year: 1995

Company name: Wipro Infotech

FIRST INTERVIEW:

(First the interviewer asked me to name two favorite subjects - OS and Networks)

a) Describe the memory management policies in Unix. How is paging
implemented? How page faults are handled?
Seems to be a favorite question for these chaps ---- Maurice Bach.

b) Write a macro in C for swapping two nibbles in a byte.
-Use the shift operators and be careful while defining temporary
variables( if you do so) as you have to write a macro. Otherwise
it is pretty simple.

c) What is the CPU-scheduling policy in Unix? - Round robin scheduling
with multilevel queues.

d) Diffrence between short term, long term and medium term scheduler.
-First two should be peaceful. The last one is also known as
swapper. (See Taenenbaum and/or Peterson)

e) Name various page-replacement policies. Which can be implemented
both with and without pre-emption? - see Peterson.

f) Describe the Sliding window protocol. What is it's advantage
over stop-and-wait? - Saves bandwidth. (Taenenbaum please)


2ND INTERVIEW

(Both personal and technical interleaved)

a) Tell us something about yourself.
b) Aren't you going for higher studies abroad? Why?
c) Rank and CGPA. MSites do not have ranks but still they wanted to
know my approx position in my batch.
- Shady question. It is your job to convince them that for
MS, grades do not hold any meaning.

d) What is re-entrant code? --- Non-self modifying code. Can be
shared by many processes simultaneously. Gave e.g. of text-editors
like 'vi'.
Counter Q: But then no code modifies itself. What does 'non-self
modifying' mean? ---- I don't know for sure.

e) Diff between compilers and interpreters. Some fundaes about
how to link code in different files.

f) What would your friends tell us about you if we ask them?

Standard question for everyone.

ALL THE BEST..