Amdocs

Amdocs placement at D.J. Sanghvi College of Engineering, Mumbai.
Date: 14th July 2008.

The recruitment process consists of the following rounds:

1) Aptitude Test (General + Technical)
2) Technical Interview
3) HR Interview

APTITUDE TEST

The duration of the test is approximately 2 hours. It was supposed to be an online test but due to some technical problems on their side, they decided to conduct a written test. There were a total of 95 questions to attempt.

The test is conducted by MeriTrac.
There is 60% sectional cut-off for both sections.

The aptitude test comprises mainly of two sections:
1) General Aptitude Test
2) Technical Test

General Aptitude test
The general aptitude test consisted of the following sub-sections:
- Arithmetic Ability (20 min)
- Verbal Reasoning (20 min)
- Attention to Detail (Very easy) (15 min)

Study the following topics for R.S. Aggarwal Verbal & Non-Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Aptitude:

- Data sufficiency
- Puzzles
- Blood relations
- Venn Diagrams
- Profit & Loss
- RC
- Percentage
- Ratio
- Cubes and Dice

Technical Test

The technical test includes three sub-sections:

- SQL (15 min)
- UNIX (15 min)
- Language (15 min) (Here you can choose between C, C++ or Java)
I chose C for the language test.

UNIX Test (15 questions)
The UNIX section comprised of 15 questions mostly on unix commands.
Some of the questions were as follows:
1) Which command would you use to change the priority of a running process?
a) nice b) ps c) top d) ls
Ans: a) nice

2) Which command is used to display the output of a command as well as store it in a file ?
a) cat b) grep c) tee d) top
Ans: c) tee

3) A series of commands are given and you're required to find the final output
$ cd /
$ ls /etc
$ cd /tmp
$ cd $_
$ pwd
a) / b) /tmp c) /etc d) error
Ans: b) /tmp

Also there were two questions where you have to find out any error(s) in a shell script. So study how to write shell scripts properly.
For the UNIX test, i would suggest you to read Sumitabha Das' UNIX Concepts and Applications.

SQL Test (15 questions)
The SQL section is very easy to clear if you know the syntax of the language properly coz most of the questions were based on identifying the correct syntax of a query.
Study JOINS, VIEWS, Aggregate functions properly for this test.

Language test (20 questions)
And finally, the language test. Only those who took C finally cleared this test. So i would suggest you to go for C. It's not a difficult section anyway. In most of the questions you are required to check if the code would result in a compilation error or no.

Some of the questions were
1) main ()
{
char s1[] = "Amdocs";
char s2[] = "DVCI";
s1 = s2;
printf ("%s", s1);
}

a) Amdocs b) DVCI c) Compilation error d) Run-time error

Ans: c) Compilation error

2) main ()
{
char s1[20] = "Amdocs DVCI";
printf ("%d", sizeof(s1));
}

a) 20 b) 11 c) 12 d) 10

Ans: a) 20

3) int main ()
{
int var[4][4] = { {1,3}, 4, 2 };
int size = 0;
var[3][2] = 5;
size = sizeof (var);
printf ("%d", size);
return 0;
}
/* assume size of int to be 2 bytes */

a) 16 b) 32 c) Initialization error d) Run-time error

Ans: c) Initialization error (some elements are not initialized)

Also, a couple of questions were based on File handling.
Study Pointers, Structures, File handling and Arrays very well.
For practice, visit http://www.c4swimmers.esmartguy.com/

Results of the test were announced after 2 hours. Out of 110 who appeared, only 24 cleared the test and i was one of them :)

12 candidates were shortlisted for interview on that day and the remaining 12 were called on the next day.
First was the technical interview and then HR.

Technical Interview

The technical interview is of about 30 minutes and make sure you have studied well. A good knowledge of UNIX and C is a must. So it went this way.

Some questions included:
- Your favourite subject
- As my work experiene was in the field of Linux and UNIX, he asked me lots of questions on UNIX like
- Explain the use of tee command
- What is the /etc/hosts file used for?
- What is the use of top command
- Whats a shell
- What is ifconfig
- Use of grep / egrep
etc
- Then he moved on to C. I was asked to implement the strcat() function without using arrays. This shows that they want you to be very good @ pointers. Then i was asked to explain the function. And some other basic questions.
- Eventually, he asked some questions on SQL. I was asked to write some queries on Joins especially outer joins. Some questions on views.

HR Interview

The HR interview was of about 10 minutes. Questions included:
1) Tell me something about yourself
2) Work experience
3) Why Amdocs ?
4) As i was already placed in Accenture, he asked me to compare the aptitude tests of accenture and amdocs. Which one was easy/difficult ? etc.
5) My strengths and weaknesses.

The results were announced on the next day. They selected 13 out of 24 candidates.

And I was lucky to be one of them :)