Shell Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus)

Royal Dutch Shell PLC, commonly known as Shell, is a British-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in the Netherlands and incorporated in England. It is one of the oil and gas “supermajors” and the third-largest company in the world measured by 2018 revenues. In the 2019 Forbes Global 2000, Shell was ranked as the ninth-largest company in the world.

Shell visited our campus on 8-sep-2020. They offered two roles one is Software Engineer and the other one is for Transformation Change Analyst. I applied for the SDE role. In total there were around 900 applications from various Branches. The Selection process is as follows:

Round 1: Online Assessment. The test consists of 53 questions divided into 4 sections the sections are as follows:

1.  Aptitude 
2.  DataBase Related Questions. 
3. One SQL query validated against a few test cases.
4. Two Programming Questions (Difficulty Level- Easy).

After the first round, 130 students got shortlisted for the second round which is a combination of Technical and Managerial round.

Round 2(Technica Interview): The interview happened on Skype, unfortunately at the start of my interview my webcam stopped working, and I was so tensed since it is a virtual interview where the camera is mandatory. I explained my situation to the interviewers, thankfully they understood my situation and agreed to continue the interview without webcam and helped me to stay calm, I am really grateful for their kind gesture which helped me to stay calm and do well.  So there were two interviewers they asked me questions based on my projects written in the resume. They asked so many in-depth questions from my projects (I really recommend not to write anything that you are not sure of in the resume). They asked me some basic questions from Java, Python, Operating systems, SQL, NoSql (I had a project on Nosql), They really covered a lot of questions from all the above-mentioned topics mainly from Data Structures and Algorithms. The technical interview went for around 45 minutes. Next, they tested my conflict solving capacity by giving me some scenarios related to work-life, Asked about my interpersonal skills, leadership skills, decision-making skills. I would say this part of the interview is similar to the behavioral round, so this went for around another 30 min. In the end they asked if I had any questions for them (it's always good to ask a few questions at the end) so I asked a few questions regarding their work culture and the projects they deal with.

A few Technical Questions that I remembered:

1. Explain in detail about Threads.
2. Differentiate between static and dynamic loading.
3. Explain about reference object.
4. Steps involved in JDBC connectivity - they expect you to answer class and methods involved.
5. Differentiate Method Overloading and overriding.
6. Explain about the Garbage collector.
7. Explain JDK, JRE and JVM.
8. Pointers in Java.
9. Load factor for a hashmap in Java.
10. List a few JavaScript frameworks.
11. Is python scripting or programming language.
12. Explain various DDL, DML, DQL, DCL and TCL commands.
13. Key features of python.
14. SQL vs NoSQL.
15. A few Machine Learning related Questions as I had my projects done in this area.
16. A few SQL queries were also asked.

After the Interview around 50 candidates got the offers. Luckily I was one of them.

Tips for my peers:

1. Be calm.
2. Make sure you have some good projects in your resume.
3. Be prepared with your resume thoroughly because you can expect most of the questions from the resume itself. Don't write anything that you are not sure of.
4. Be prepared with the basic concepts of oops, OS, Java, and SQL.
5. In the first assessment, round make sure you clear Programming and SQL questions perfectly.

Overall It was really a great experience. Thank you GeeksforGeeks for giving us this wonderful opportunity to share my experiences.