Hello Everyone, I will keep it short and sweet.
I am Deva, I wrote gate cse in 2025, Gate rank 486, Score 772
For mtech ra in iitb there is a compulsory programming test, we had 4 questions in total, i could answer 2 of them, after which i was shortlisted for interview, the questions will be there on this link.
some tips for programming test: we will be using iitb's inhouse teaching website to give the test(bodhi i think it is called), we will work on ubuntu system, gdb will be there, vscode will be there(no extensions), if you know how to configure gdb for vscode good, otherwise you can do debugging in cli anyway.
you will be given reference pages for basic i/o operations, memory operations those kinds of things, NOTE that c++ STL reference will not be given, you cannot use cppref or other sites, you need to know them by heart.
Here is what i remember from my interview - i have excerpted only relevant parts from what i remember - and one quick note - for sysad interview final year students will only be interviewing you since they only have to do the KT to you, so i guess institute lets them take the interview, there was one prof in the panel (i think it was soumen chakraborty sir) , and the vibes were very chill.
q1: introduce yourself
i had prepared a strong introduction, since i was expecting this question
told about my project, and my work ex. in that the last point was as follows
...My main contribution was in developing a memory module for a text-to-sql chatbot for a logistics company
q: can you tell us about this memory module, as much as you are permitted to reveal ofc
I told them about it
q: in your schema, was the schema tailored to the client or was it generalized
a: initally we had planned of making it generalized but later on because of time constraint we ended up making it specialized
q: give an eg
( an eg)
q: how much ai did you use in your coding?
a: i have switched to doing unit testing completely using ai, it saves a lot of time, after the tests are ready i debug them to ensure they are actually testing what they are supposed to test.
and in general it completely depends on time constraint if we need to ship something today then full thing we do on ai, but i try to do thing by myself as much as possible.
(then i asked the prof )
q: sir what do you think, how do we balance using ai and coding manually? what are your thoughts on that subject.
I told them about it
a: he said something about how for newer languages and newer uses ai is very bad, he said some specific egs also i forgot
q. which language do you like?
a: most of my work i have done in python but i prefer c++
q. what do you think are cons of python?
a: speed obv
(then he started talking about programming languages, he was saying that origin of python was like they had a plan and make python according to that. normally how new programming languages are made is , there is a problem and then we try to solve the problem using the new prog lang, and that python did not evolve naturally like that)
q: which filesystems have you used?
a: mainly ext4, but i have read about zfs, and one of my seniors was working on btrfs so i sat with it for a while
q: what is the usecase of zfs?
a: .....snapshotting .....
q: if we were to try to implement snapshotting in ext4 how would we go about doing it?
a: ...knew 1 simple way told about it....
q: then he asked some active question in zfs that i dint even understand, something like - there are block devices in linux, zfs can pool all these devices and make it one block device, and then implement RAID, these are 2 diff things could they have not been seperated, why did they go with this design choice basically, what are you thoughts on this?
a: ...some gas, i think he was fine with it......
q. can you tell us about how the packet travels through the network stack when receving?
told about napi, hard req, soft irq, and path in general
q. what ways did you look at in improving your latency?
talked about rss, rps, rfs, arfs
then i got prompted about kernel params like buffer sizes then i mentioned that i used that also.
thats it then they told me you can leave.
