What Do IT Interviewers Actually Ask Freshers in Pune? Real Questions from TCS, Infosys, and Startups (2026)
You have got an interview lined up. It may be for TCS or Infosys or even a start-up from Hinjewadi. You are aware of all OOP concepts and definitions, and you have revised your SQL. What you really want to know is what the interviewer is going to ask you and what a good answer would look like. Generic preparation guides give you categories. This blog gives you the actual questions pulled from verified 2026 interview experiences across TCS, Infosys, and Pune startups organised by company, by round, and by role. Read through the section for your target company before your interview. Bookmark the ones you cannot answer yet. Those are your preparation gaps. The short version: what each company actually asks freshers in 2026: TCS Technical Round: Your project in depth, OOP with real-world examples, SQL queries (joins, GROUP BY, EXISTS, UNION), one basic coding problem, and a new 2026 question about AI vs traditional software systems. Infosys SE Round: Which programming language are you comfortable with (sets the direction of everything after), OOP pillars with examples, DBMS normalisation from 1NF to BCNF, SQL triggers. SP and PP rounds add live DSA coding on linked lists, trees, and sorting. Pune Startup Technical Round: React hooks and component architecture, Node.js event loop, REST API design, Django ORM, and a GitHub portfolio walkthrough. System design basics even for freshers at product companies. TCS technical interview: real questions freshers are being asked in 2026 Based on Glassdoor’s TCS interview database updated June 2026 across 25,558 submitted reviews, the average interview difficulty is rated 2.7 out of 5, and 72.7% of candidates rate the experience as positive. The technical round stays close to your resume. TCS technical interviews mostly stay close to your resume and project work; they rarely go into deep DSA or system design for freshers. That is genuinely good news if you actually built the project on your resume. The project questions where every TCS interview actually begins Before any OOP question, before any SQL query, the interviewer will ask about your project. This is not a warm-up. It is where TCS interviewers spend the most time, and it is where most freshers either win or lose the round. These are the actual questions reported from TCS technical interviews in 2026: “Tell me about your final year project.” “What problem does your project solve?” “Which technology did you use and why did you choose it over alternatives?” “How does the backend of your project work?” “What was the most difficult part of building this?” “What would you change if you rebuilt it today?” “What happens when a user clicks the submit button? Walk me through the full flow.” Interviewers ask follow-up questions from whatever is written on the resume, especially about project tools and technologies. If Django is listed on the resume, the interviewer will ask about Django views. If MySQL is listed, they will ask about the database schema. If React is listed, they will ask about component structure. Every skill on the resume is fair game for a follow-up question. The students who struggle in this section are the ones who followed a tutorial and listed the tutorial’s technology as their own skills. The ones who do well are the ones who made at least one genuine technical decision during the project and can explain why. OOP questions TCS freshers are actually asked “What is object-oriented programming? Name the four pillars.” “Give me a real-world example of inheritance, not just a definition.” “What is the difference between method overloading and method overriding?” “Explain polymorphism with a code example or a real-world scenario.” “What is encapsulation and why would you use it?” “What is abstraction? How is it different from encapsulation?” “What is a constructor? Can it be overloaded?” “What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface?” The pattern across these is consistent. Interviewers at TCS do not want dictionary definitions. Saying “polymorphism means many forms” gets a follow-up that most candidates cannot answer. A simple code example, or a real-world analogy that demonstrates you actually understand the concept, is what earns positive feedback in this round. A useful way to prepare: for each OOP pillar, write one sentence definition and one concrete real-world example that is not the textbook Animal-Dog example everyone uses. Use something from your actual project. SQL questions: asked in almost every TCS technical round SQL is asked in almost every TCS technical interview. Joins, subqueries, indexing, EXISTS, NOT EXISTS, IN, NOT IN, GROUP BY, HAVING, UNION, UNION ALL, INTERSECT, and MINUS are all commonly tested. Real SQL questions from TCS interviews in 2026: “Write a query to find the second highest salary in a table.” “What is the difference between WHERE and HAVING? When do you use each?” “Explain INNER JOIN versus LEFT JOIN with a practical example.” “What is a primary key? Can it be null?” “What is normalisation? Walk me through 1NF and 2NF.” “What is the difference between DELETE, TRUNCATE, and DROP?” “Write a query to count employees in each department.” “What is a subquery? Write one.” Prepare to write these queries on paper or a whiteboard, not just talk about them. TCS interviewers frequently ask candidates to write out the query rather than describe it. Coding questions: one problem, basic to medium difficulty The technical round conducted by TCS usually consists of one basic question. Examples include the second largest number, reverse string, palindrome, Fibonacci series, or a factorial. It’s all about the logic and good code, rather than DSA. Practice writing such questions manually rather than coding them on an IDE. If you are being interviewed by TCS, there is a chance that you will have to write code manually as well. The logic will carry weightage, but still, you need to be sure about the correctness of your code. The new question in 2026: AI versus traditional software A June 2026 Glassdoor interview submission for TCS contains this verbatim: “What is the difference between
