Royal Dutch Shell Interview Experience
Question Details
Round 1:First round was an online test conducted by CoCubes. It was an adaptive test. It has three sections which included Quants, logical reasoning and technical section....
Full Details
Round 1 First round was an online test conducted by CoCubes. It was an adaptive test. It has three sections which included Quants, logical reasoning and technical section. TIPS: Try practicing previous years CoCubes question paper. It will definitely help.
Round 2 (Technical Round) It was a Skype round. The Interviewer browsed through my resume. He asked me to introduce myself. He asked me to pick up my favorite project and give him a brief idea about it. He later asked me to tell about the challenges which I faced during the Project. He then asked me how can Computer Science be used in an oil based company like Shell He then gave me a table and asked me to perform normalization on it. It was followed by a lot of discussion on Database Normalization. He also asked me about triggers and ACID properties. He then gave me a C program and asked me to give the output of that program.
Round 3 (HR Round) It was again a Skype round. He asked me to introduce myself. He asked me whether the projects mentioned in my resume were individual projects or done in a group. He gave me scenarios like if one of the team members was not working then how would I deal with it. He asked me to describe a situation in which I met a major obstacle in order to complete a project. How did I deal with it? What steps did I take? In the end he asked me if I had any questions for him. TIPS: Know your resume well. A lot of questions will be asked on projects and also be prepared to answer a lot of behavioral questions. The results came out the next day and I got selected :)
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a shell interview for a data science role during the oa round reported in 2017.
It covers the following topics: Sql .
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More Shell Interview Questions
About Shell Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Shell. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Shell are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Shell interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Shell reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Shell Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Shell reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.