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9. Software Developer TypeScript/C++, Rohde & Schwarz GmbH (Munich, Bavaria)
Language: German.
On-site interview: The interview took place directly at their HQ in Munich. The interviewers were a hiring manager and a recruiter. First, the recruiter picked me up at the reception and brought me to the seminar room where the hiring manager was waiting for me. We had a small talk on the way to the seminar room. Basically, small talk is about if you find the way to the company easily and about the weather. It was the first time for me to walk around that HQ area. There are many buildings in construction. It seems that R&S has a great business activity. And we talked about for which purpose those buildings are. As we arrived seminar room, the recruiter asked me what to drink (always water without gas) and the interview began.
First, as usual, they introduced themselves, the company, business area, and the department. Then, it was my turn to introduce my academic background from the Bachelor’s study to Master’s (basically 1~2 minutes). Finally, they started to ask HR questions:
— How would you deal with conflicts? Example?
— Could you please describe your teamwork experience? What is the most challenging and difficult things in that experience? How did you solve them and what did you learn from them?
— What would you do when you have a problem with debugging?
— How would you describe your ideal boss?
— What is the most important things for you by working?
— What is your current status (visa, working permit, etc.)?
— What if your proposal or idea was not adopted, how do you feel? Can you accept it?
— What would your friends describe your personality?
— The last question was a trap: you did learn more about digital circuit design, what would you expect in this job? (But this position is not relevant to digital circuit design!!!!)
After the interview, the recruiter brought me back to reception and ask me for the feedback like “how was the interview?” etc. My friend also told me that I could also ask for feedback about me so that I could improve my interview skills.
I felt very confident after this interview. They expected the applicants who do not constrain their technical skill in a specific area but wider and is willing to learn new things. It is a great chance for a fresh graduate. Unfortunately, I still got rejection after one week. I wrote them an E-Mail for the feedback and it turned out that I did not answer the question about “dealing with conflict” ideally as they expected. So, I may not fit the team when conflicts occur. I very appreciated the feedback and am grateful, though.
10. Firmware-Software Developer for System Z Mainframe, IBM Germany GmbH (Böblingen, Baden-Württemberg)
Language: German (partially English)
The response from IBM was relatively fast. I got an invitation E-Mail for one week. It is also fast for us to apply for American companies because they do not require a cover letter, while German companies always require it.
Applicants Day: I thought there would be like an assessment center. But there were only three applicants including me and the other two applicants are not German. The 6 hours interview looks like the following:
HR presented System Z Firmware department and also showed us the physical mainframe machine. It was pretty impressive. They also mentioned which part of System Z is developed by teams in Böblingen and which from New York. The rest of the time before lunch, the applicants had 15 minutes to prepare a 10 minutes presentation about themselves together in a common room. We can present it with the help of a chart (any style is welcome.) Several points should be included in this presentation:
— Why IBM? Why IBM Firmware?
— Who you are? What do you have? What are you the best candidate for us?
— What do you see yourself in 5 years?
Considering fairness, each applicant presents their own self-introduction separately so that applicants won’t know each other. While one was presenting, others have different parts i.e. HR interview or taking a break. No one did the same thing at the same time in the same place.
Lunchtime:
There were two young IBM engineers bringing us to their canteen for free lunch :). The meal portion was really huge. I am not kidding. I hear that American companies provide often a super big meal. These two IBMers shared their experience and life at IBM with us. For example, how often did they have business travel to New York? One of the applicant, a Russian next to me, always talked about the technical stuff which I did not have the opportunity to join them. (It is now obvious who has better technical knowledge.)
Afternoon:
After the free lunch and coffee pause, The most important part of the interview was coming: 3 individual interviews with 3 different teams. Each interview took 45 minutes. Each applicant went to a separate room and after 45 minutes we changed the interviewer. Each team showed their work in System Z mainframe. The whole process contained around 50% of tasks introduction and 50% of technical interview questions. It was very casual and the questions were not that tough. I think the most difficult thing for me is to ask them questions about their stuff (System Z mainframe) and I was afraid of asking wrong and stupid questions that may let them think that I am not technically qualified. So what I did is to ask something like “Could you please explain more about XX in your mainframe? I did not really get it and it looks very fancy.” or “How could your new employee get a quick start with IBM? What does your training phase look like?".
Some technical questions I still remember are the following:
— Design Pattern (especially Singleton).
— Protected inheritance in C++.
— How do you test rarely used functions in a program?
— Conflict situation, Python vs C++, memory?
— Questions about Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient Algorithm, because this is from my Master’s thesis and the interviewer just did not know. So they asked. (Furthermore: how did I implement this algorithm? Did I just google it and copy/paste the code?)
In the end, I spoke mostly with another Indian applicant who studied at the Technical University of Darmstadt and has two years working experience in industrial automation area. We exchanged the interview questions and it turned out that the questions were the same for both of us.
I thought that they would somehow hire at least one of us among those three teams. But one month later, I saw one of the hiring managers at another job fair in Munich recruiting the same position in Böblingen. I guessed that none of us got hired for this position.
11. Embedded-Systems-Developer/Software Engineer Automotive Software (C++), Pixida GmbH (Munich, Bavaria)
Language: German.
Telephone interview: HR called me without an appointment. But she just asked me very simple questions and check my background basically such as “What did you do from 2013 to 2014, and how about after 2018” etc. “Do you speak German (although we speak German on the phone)?” I think she just wanted to check something unclear in my CV. That’s it.
Coding test: They wrote me an E-mail and gave me an online coding test (1 hr, three questions). I have to finish it within one week. This is good because there was no one in front of you pushing you. If you have time, LeetCode is a great platform to prepare the coding test. I finished approximately 100 problems and have more confidence for the coding test.
These three coding questions:
— To sort an array (without considering performance).
— To remove duplicated elements in an array (without considering performance).
— To return a maximum number that shows the longest contiguous “1” bits in a 32-bit integer when flipping a “0” to “1”. (without considering performance).
On-site Interview: The interview consisted of two sections, one is general about my CV and background, another is a technical interview.
a. General Interview: German
— 15 minutes for preparing the presentation about myself, and 10 minutes for the presentation. They have a list that I have to cover in my presentation.
I must give them some information like: “What is your career highlight so far?”, “Did you have any failed experience?” etc. After my presentation, we started the face to face interview:
— Why in Germany? Why not in Stuttgart? Why in ETH Zurich Master thesis?
— Why using STM32 discovery board? What is the goal of the thesis? What did you do in thesis?
— What would your family describe you?
— What would your family say what you could do better?
— What would you like to do in 3~5 year?
— What is your room for improvement?
— Which area would you like to do?
— What is your ideal working life?
— At the end of this section, they presented the business area of the company and we talked about the start day and salary.
b. Technical Interview: English
— Memory layout (data segmentation: text, data, bss, heap, and stack)
— Basic C/C++ question (declaration of variables, pointers, function pointers, array)
— A screenshot of the oscilloscope (it was I2C signal image, I need to recognize it.)
— Question about the electrical capacitor on the datasheet.
— Bit manipulation (|,&, ^, <<, >> etc.)
— Is it a good idea to throw an exception during destructor? (Effective C++)
— Virtual, abstract concept in C++.
— Philosophy about pointer (C++), the garbage collector (open file pointer).
— Debugging code for interrupt service routine.
— Symmetric/ asymmetric encryption (but removed, cause I don’t have experience. They adjusted the questions exclusively for the applicant.)
— Some Git commands that I have never used them.
— What is Clean Code? Philosophy about Clean Code?
— How to use change the certain string in all the text files in a directory by the terminal (bash)
— volatile keyword (again) in embedded system and multi-threads programming.
— We discussed again the coding test question (To remove duplicated elements in an array) which I did not solve it in the time constraint. This time I used a very naive way to solve it.
After these interviews, I thought I performed very well because the technical interview was not difficult and I solved most questions they gave. If I rate my performance in the interview, I would give 6 out of 10 for the general interview and 8 out of 10 for the technical interview.
Continue: How do job interviews look in Germany (1/4)?
Continue: How do job interviews look in Germany (2/4)?
Continue: How do job interviews look in Germany (4/4)?
