NetApp Interview Questions

This year Netapp came to MNIT on August 19. In the seminar itself they made it clear that they need students only for QA (Quality Assurance).

They had a written round in the morning , announced the results at 3.00 PM where they shortlisted 12 students.

All the 12 students were called for the interviews at 3.30 PM.
After the first interview they again shortlisted 6 students and called them for the interview the next day. The scapegoats were not aware that they were to face not 1, not 2 but...3 grueling interviews!!!

So here I present all the questions that were asked to me in the 4 interviews that I faced.

I interview (Aug 19)

1. What do you know about NetApp? Do you know anyone there?

2. I can see that you have made a Robot (after seeing my resume). Can you explain me what kind of a robot was it? Explain me in full detail everything that you did giving details of the basics.

As I was explaining...there were counter questions.
He asked me if I had a photograph of the robot. :P On saying 'no' he asked : then what proof do you have to prove that you made the robot.
me : Sir I have the Certificate of the competition in which I participated...on saying this the smile on his face was killing...he didnt see the certificates.

3. If you were interested in making robots then why didnt you take mechanical engineering?
me : I have the plans to make robots with some artificial intelligence capabilities...for that I will have to program the robots either in LISP/Prolog.


4. You have to impress me in 2 minutes. Start.

5. What is your area of interest.
me : computer networking.

6. Then he asked what a bridge is?
7. Can you give me the example of any presentation layer protocol?
8. Explain the concept of subnetting by taking an example of a Class A IP address.
9. Tell me something about your family.
10. What are your strengths?

11. Write a C++ program for multiple inheritance.
After I made the program he asked me if it is possible to declare a base class constructor in the derived classes?
What will happen if I make a member function in the derived class with the same name as that of the Base class member?

12. If you had the option of choosing between the developer profile and QA, what is it that you will really go for?
me : i will choose to be a developer but with NetApp to work as a beginner in QA I have no problems.

13. Tell me your daily routine.

Ok...I am done with you...Do you want to ask me any questions?

II Interview (Aug 20)

1. You have worked on LDAP...explain me how LDAP works.
I explained everything. In between there were counter questions like what is SSL, DES,SHA,etc...

2. OK. Now suppose that you have made an LDAP module. How will you perform negative testing on it?
My answer : port open in firewall or not, number of simultaneous connections, hardware support, network bandwidth,...
He said explain me from the perspective of the Client-Server architecture.
I explained something about the injection attacks, the security of the encryption algorithms used, need for strong passwords, dictionary and brute force attacks, PAM modules etc...

3. What makes a strong password?

4. Then he asked me to write a C/C++ program for the following:
You are given a file that has the entries like:

SNO : student name : marks

What you have to do is to read the file and write the names and marks of the students into another file in descending order. But make sure that you take care of all the boundary conditions and the program should be completely fool proof i.e. for eg. if the student name field is empty then you should take appropriate actions.

I did my best to make a fool proof program with all the checks.
But then the irony.........he told me that at NetApp you will be a part of the testing team. So now what you have to do is find as many errors as possible in this program.

I started thinking from the perspective of the operating system, i was able to find some of the conditions where my program went into infinite loops, some conditions for the memory bleeding, etc.

5. Explain me how a NAS works.
I told him that I had installed a NAS in the college to mount the home directories of all the mail users, then he asked:
What is the difference between a SAN and a NAS?
me : NAS works on TCP/UDP while SAN on iSCSI...

6. What is firmware?
7. What are device drivers? Why do we need them? Why the application program or the new hardware that you attach cannot talk to the kernel directly?
What is the difference between device drivers and firmware?

9.You have worked on Unix...so explain me the whole Unix architecture.
10. What are the file permissions in Unix? How can you change them?

11. What do mean by white-box testing? Give me an example to explain.
What are the types of white box testing?Give examples for all.

12. Why do you want to join NetApp?

III Interview (Aug 20)

1. How are you? How are the interviews going on? How has been the experience until now?

2. You have 25 horses. There are 5 similar tracks and only 1 horse can run on a track at a time.
You have to find the fastest 3 horses out of these...But you have no time or distance measuring instrument. You know only the starting and finishing lines.
Write an optimised algorithm that minimises the number of runs.

And here it comes again...After I gave him a working algorithm, he asked me : as a part of the testing team how will you test this algorithm for the possible bugs that might crop up.

-->I gave him around 8-9 exhaustive test cases like for eg. my code would fail in the case if more than 2 horses reach the finishing line together or if all the horses do not start at the same time the results would not be correct that's why when we implement thrking.is algorithm we need to have clock synchronisation and precision of the nanosecond range.

3. Rate yourself on networking.
me: 8/10

4. Ok then explain me the routing algorithms that you know.
-->I explained him the Link State and Distance Vector algorithms.

5. What is RIP?
6. What are the problems associated with RIP?
7. What are the internal and external gateway protocols?

IV Interview (Aug 20)

This was a pure HR interview.
She asked me the following questions:

1.Tell me your educational background from the time you came into this college, what all you did and learned.

2. Did you do anything after coming into the college that made you famous?

3. What all did you do to improve the conditions in your college?

4. Are you a team player or do you like to work alone?

5. Do you know what exactly your job will be at NetApp?

6. Will you be able to perform well for this kind of a job?

Moral of the Story (for me) : It was useless to spend on the folder, it was never really opened up! :P

I was really upset to have a hair cut for the placements, the only thing that could have soothed me was getting placed in NetApp :)