Citrix Placement Tips and Interview Experience

Citrix Placement Tips

Founded: 1989

Founder: Ed Iacobucci

Headquarters: Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States

Area served: Global

Key people: Robert Calderoni (Chairman)

David Henshall (CEO)

Products: Application Delivery Industry, Virtualization software (DaaS),

 SaaS, cloud, and networking

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational software company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. 

It was founded in Richardson, Texas in 1989 by Ed Iacobucci, who served as chairman until his departure in 2000.

The company began by developing remote access products for Microsoft operating systems. It licensed source code from Microsoft and has been in partnership with the company throughout its history. 

Citrix came to prominence in the 1990s as a leader in thin clienttechnology, purpose built for accessing remote servers. 

Round I

Section 1:

There was a 1 hr aptitude test & 1 hour coding round.

The aptitude test had simple questions on c/cpp, Networking, OS etc. and some general quant aptitude questions.

The coding round had 2/3 questions to be done in 1 hour.

Section 2:

Q1: A matrix of 1s & 0s are given, you have to find no of groups of adjacent 1s. Adjacency was based on 8-connectedness. (Finding no of components in an undirected graph)

Q2: A number is given and you had to translate it to string form (Indian system – lakhs, crores etc. not millions, billions etc) .

The word “and” had to be added at the appropriate place (after 100s place if there was a digit in 10s or 1s place).

101 => one hundred and one
2311 => two thousand three hundred and eleven
900020 => nine lakh and twenty
35 => thirty five
3 => three
1<=N<=999999999

Q1. Given a number, you need to check whether any permutation of the number is divisible by 8 or not. Print Yes or No accordingly.

Eg.- I/P- 46. O/P- Yes. Since 64 is divisible by 8.

I/P- 345. O/P- No. Since neither of 345,354,435,453,534,543 is divisible by 8.

Q2. Given a matrix of 1s and 0s, rewrite the matrix such that it consists of distance matrix from the original positions of 1s.

Eg.- I/P: 0001

             0100

             1000

             0001

      O/P: 2110

             1011

              0121

              1210

3 coding question on basic data structures and algorithms. Use of STL wasn’t allowed.

1.         Print a ‘Y’ shaped pattern from asterisks in n number of lines.

2.         Level-order traversal of k-ary tree. Print all levels line by line.

3.         Implement an LRU cache. (Prototypes were there to implement).

Round 2 (Technical Interview: 45 mins)

The interviewer asked me to introduce myself and help him run through my resume. He then asked me if I liked coding which I answered in affirmative. He then asked me to code the following questions:

Q1. Given a n*n matrix, print the matrix in spiral form. 

Q2. Given a binary tree, print the tree in spiral form. 

Q3. Given a 2d array, print the maximum contiguous sum. 

He asked me to dry run the codes and made sure that it all worked efficiently. Once he was satisfied with the codes, he shifted to Operating Systems.

What is a deadlock? How can you make sure that deadlock doesn’t occur? What is Banker’s algorithm? What is Reader-Writer problem?

He also asked me a couple of questions from Networking which I can’t recall.

Round 3 (Technical Interview: 40-45 mins)

The interview began very casually with the interviewer asking me to tell him some special attractions about my hometown. After which, he moved to more important parts of my resume.

He asked me about my internships and also asked some questions related to that. Following which he asked me to briefly explain the academic project I had undertaken in my course.

He then asked me to code the following question: Given 2 arrays of fixed size 8 and 4 consisting of 4 integers each in the sorted order, merge the 2 arrays without using any extra memory. Initially I solved this question by starting from the front and shifting the elements accordingly. The interviewer then asked me to improve the complexity and even suggested to start from the back. I managed to solve it almost immediately once I got the hint.

He then shifted his attention to OS and Networking. What is TCP Three-Way Handshake? What happens when you enter a website on your browser(DNS Server)? What do you mean by synchronization? How do you overcome a deadlock state?

Round 4 (HR Interview 20-25 mins)

The interviewer quickly ran through my results until this round and gave me a nice smile and said I had been doing good so far.
He began with the usual question, “Tell me about yourself?”

He then asked me why there was a drop in my CGPA from the 5th to the 6th semester. I had been dreading this question but managed to get past it.

He then asked me where I saw myself in the next 5 years. He then asked me if I had any plans of any Masters degree.

Tips/Advices

MCQs are equally important as the coding questions. There are students who managed to qualify without solving any coding question while people who had solved 1 question lost out. 

They don’t always look for the correct answer but look for the approach and how does one think when given a challenge. 

Make sure to be thorough with your CV,especially projects and internship. Don’t write anything that you are not confident about, it leaves a bad impression if you aren’t able to answer questions related to it.
Interviewers are really friendly and make sure that you are comfortable.
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INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE (Yashika Chawla)

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I was interviewed on-campus at IIT Guwahati for Software test engineer role at Citrix.

Interview Process

Round 1

Test Duration: 90 Minutes

No. of Questions: 30 questions

Test Sections

Section 1: Programming

Section 2: Multiple Choice Questions

Experience

There were two coding problems of moderate level difficulty and many multiple choice questions from various subjects of computer science (Operating Systems, Networks, Data structure and Algorithms). 

Also there were some good puzzles and aptitude questions.

Tips

1. For coding : Practice on LeetCode (oj.leetcode.com/problems/)

2. For MCQs : Knowledge of operating system and other courses is required

3. Puzzles : Practice puzzles and some tricky aptitude questions

Round 2

Question 1: C++/C/Data Structure/Algorithm Related Questions

Question 2: Difference b/w char *str=

Question 3: Efficient Algorithm for checking prime number

Question 4: Puzzles :http://www.abc.net.au/science/surfingscientist/pdf/conundrum16.pdf

Question 5: Questions on Linked List/Stack

Question 6: Operator Overloading

Question 7: Object Oriented Programming : Describe everything you know about OOP? (Encapsulation, Polymorphism, Inheritance etc.)

Question 8: What do you understand by Software Testing?

Question 9: No. of zeros in 100!

Question 10: How to swap two numbers without using auxiliary storage? (Explained using XOR logic)

Question 11: Given a pen, how would you test it? (Around 20 points were discussed)

Question 12: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/merge-one-array-of-size-n-into-another-one-of-size-mn/

Interview Experience

I had total 4 technical interviews and I have added questions for all of them above. Mainly the interviewers were friendly and were helping me thinking through problems. They really wanted to check the confidence of the candidate and were grilling me on some questions.

Interview Tips

1. Study Data Structure and Algorithms (Cormen, GeeksforGeeks)

2. Study OOP and concepts of CPP (Schildt)

3. Solve good no. of puzzles

4. Have a look at typical HR questions

Round 3

Interview Questions

Question 1: Why do you want to work for Citrix?

Question 2: Which other companies did you apply for and which interview did you have today?

Question 3: Why should we hire you?

Question 4: Were you expecting a better JEE rank?

Question 5: Are you okay with relocating to other cities?

Question 6: Are you aware of salaries and other benefits we are offering? Are you okay with it?

Interview Experience

This was a quick discussion with company HR.

Interview Tips

Have a look at typical HR questions and be confident

Skills Tested

Programming

Analytical Thinking

Mathematics

Computer Science Fundamentals

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Jay Jagannath Swami Nayana Patha Gami Bhaba Tume Bhaba Tume ...    

Mr. Tribikram Pradhan

Research Scholar, Dept. of CSE

Indian Institute of Technology, (BHU), Varanasi

E-Mail:  tribikram14@gmail.com