I applied online. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at IBM (Bengaluru) in Mar 2016
Interview
Round 1:
90 minutes
20 MCQs and 2 Programming Questions.
Programs were based on Strings and Arrays.
The modules were already given by the company itself.
The first was conducted in HackerRank.
Round 2:
75 minutes.
Pen and paper test.
It is also a programming round.
The number of questions will be get increased based on your solving ability within that 75 minutes.
They need O(1) solution for those questions, if it possible. Otherwise, they need the best solution for the given question.
They sat in front of me and assess my code.
Programming language is not a matter. You can use your preferable language. I prefer Python and C programming.
Note: They are very clear in this. Don’t use any inbuilt functions. Sometimes, even striking out the code was not allowed.
Round 3:
45 – 60 minutes
They ask me 2 programming questions and 3 testing and troubleshooting questions.
As usual, for coding they need only the best solutions.
For testing and troubleshooting, they need at least 30 – 40 test cases and troubleshooting techniques.
For me, He didn’t ask me to stop until i write 35 for each.
I wrote 35 as minimum and 68 as maximum.
While you writing the solutions, they thoroughly go through your resumes and ask questions from that.
After the third completed, You can ask questions to the HR before you come out from.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Storage Classes in C-asked me almost every thing.(long discussion)
2. Memory layout of C programs.(he was looking for the details)
3. structure and union (every minute detail)
4. Complicated C declaration (asked to write prototype of functions)
5. Constant pointers and pointers to constant(he asked me to explain through diagram)
6. Structure padding and alignment.(why padding,how does it helps,how do we force complier not to allow padding)
7. Dangling pointers,malloc,caloc,realloc,free
Quite long discussion.Other questions like how does free operator knows how much memory
to freed.A lot more questions.
8. Questions on pointers(single pointer,double pointer and a lot)
9. About MACROS and preprocessor.
10. Preincrement and postincrement operator(was asked to write output and logic behind it)
11. Inline functions,dyanamic arrays,enum,
and a lot
12. about OOPS
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at IBM (Pune) in May 2026
Interview
It was great ez they asked me pretty basic stuff such as palindrome and string manipulation and the interviewer was a bit frank with me he and i did some chit chat for a bit as occured that we were from same town
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The one thing that they asked me was what technology are u familiar with that IBM uses
The process was okay but the result of the interview took so much time. NO reply to the mails as well. interview was offline and has 3 different rounds. one language round, then coding round and then interview.
First round was a language round that was conducted online. We were asked multiple simple questions in English to test our listening, speaking and reading skills. The next round was a coding assessment round. We were shown two questions of easy-medium level difficulty from the competitive coding website Hacker Rank. The 3rd round was a behavioral assessment round where we were given 5 questions and for each question we were allotted 5 mins to answer before the system automatically submits and goes to the next question. The questions were similar to "Explain about a situation where your leadership allowed for a problem to be solved" etc. The last round was the interview round where they asked both technical and non technical questions. The technical questions that were asked where from the projects we have made that were noted down on our resumes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain the reason why you used that python library A over python library B and how would you implement that reasoning into your future career at IBM if accepted?
