Maxim Integrated Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I met with 8 people for interviews. Usually, you meet more, but some people were away, so I got lucky. If they like me, I'll have another round with the rest of them. It was a really good way to do it because there was enough time to ask any question I could think of about the job. By the end, I felt like I knew exactly what they wanted. Everyone had their own way of asking questions. The more senior folks asked more open-ended, casual questions about things not directly related to the job. The people at my level asked questions formally, with a lot of words, and a bit awkwardly.

The first interview was a phone call where I was asked some basic technical questions and an algorithm question, and had to explain my approach. After that, I was invited to the office for the next round, which was about 4-5 hours long. Initially, two engineers asked me some fairly straightforward technical questions. Then, a senior developer joined and asked more technical questions along with some code case scenarios. Following that, a manager came and asked further technical and algorithm questions on a whiteboard. The manager inquired if I had been working while studying, and upon my asking why, he mentioned that he thought my grades weren't very high and speculated it might be due to working during my studies. I found this approach outdated, especially considering I had 3 years of experience as a full-time software engineer at a major telecommunications company. It seemed like they prioritized university grades over actual technical capabilities, which suggests a potentially biased evaluation system focused on academic background rather than performance.

First there was a written test which covered aptitude, data structures, database questions and basic programming language concepts. Then there were 5 personal interviews. These interviews were a mix of technical, MR, HR and behavioral questions spread across multiple rounds. The technical round specifically had questions from data structures, RDBMS and DBMS, language specific (.Net/Java/C/C++), case study type, SQL queries, and programming concepts.