HCLTech Entry Level Software Engineer interview questions

Applied on a Sunday, got an email Tuesday night asking me to come in for an interview on Wednesday morning. I took it. Went in, not expecting much. About 10 candidates (myself included) went into a room and were handed paper tests. 12 questions on C# and 12 questions on SQL. A few easy ones but most were trick questions or really specific almost vocab-like questions. After the test, applicants were called into one-on-one interviews with a personal interviewer. Each candidate had a unique interviewer. While I was waiting to be assigned my interviewer, I talked with the guy who brought us in the room (I call him the interviewer’s boss) and he said typically on the written test, they don’t care if you’re super fluent in either C# or SQL. So long as you get half the questions on the test right, they push you into the individual interviews. My interviewer walked in and asked some whiteboard questions. I hadn’t practiced much the night before (It was my first engineering interview and I talked with some engineers in the family as to what I should expect and they said to expect very little in the way of technical questions since it’s entry level - bad advice). My basic linked list creation and insertion code was messy but it worked. Interviewer didn’t seem pleased (almost like he wanted perfection and didn’t want to settle but had to because his boss was in the room observing both of us). My interviewer then asked me an SQL whiteboard question which I butchered. He talked with his boss who came to me and said I was just on the edge of being what they were looking for but my butchering of the SQL question was the silver bullet to my chance on going to the next (apparently final if I heard him right) level of interviews. He said that he decided to specifically watch me out of all of the other interviewees because I was genuinely curious about everything. From what the answers were to the test, to what the company was like, to what I did wrong on my whiteboard problems. He asked me to study up again and try again in call them back to try again in two weeks. So TL;DR: Interview was almost copy-paste what I’ve heard from other Entry Level interviews. Paper test followed by whiteboard then a third group technical interview. Felt almost too easy but I just didn’t prep well (apparently other applicants didn’t either because we all got invites to interview at the last minute). Brush up on basic data structures, space complexity, runtime, etc. Also brush up on EVERYTHING to do with SQL. They expect you to at least be comfortable with both C# and SQL. Don’t bother going if you don’t know either.

Recruiter emailed me 3 days before the interview in Sunnydale which was on a Saturday at 10:30am. Got there and was paired with a guy for some coding challenges. He was not very helpful giving me feedback on my code mostly he seemed upset to be there on a Saturday.