Ariba Principal Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interviewed May 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took 2 days)

Went through a local IT recruiter. There was an initial phone interview which went well, interviewers attitude was good and he explored stuff on my resume. Also the typical questions on data structures, how does a hash map work internally etc. I was shortlisted for the next round which would apparently be an all-day event. All good.

Landed at Ariba Bangalore office at designated time. First interview panel (one guy) had great attitude, asked questions relevant to architecture and Ariba domain. Example: how would you design a data-model for master-detail where detail could have unlimited attribute key-values. Are there options beyond RDBMS etc. All good. Questions on web-applications. How can you make the UI more richer and responsive. What if you wanted to "push" updates in real-time from the server.

Unfortunately from the next interview onwards, things went downhill. The next two panels (again one guy each) were intent on treating the interview as a ragging session rather than a means to understand candidate skills. If you want to get a job at Ariba, read up on data-structures, all the way from linked-lists, stacks, queues and especially trees. Keep in mind that the guys interviewing you have interviewed so many people before you so because of that, their fundamentals are much better than the lesser mortals who invented data structures. So my advice is, early on in the interview try to understand the interviewers intent, if they want to prove your ignorance about the finer details of binary tree traversal, you have no choice but to swallow your pride and let the alpha-male in the room take control. Try to divert the interview to other topics that you know about as fast as possible.

A possible question you could ask the interviewer in the end is to throw more light on the "bug fests" that happen at Ariba and the interviewer's thoughts on how much of data structures theory applies when handling these bug fests.