You may hear of the power programmer role which is also known as the specialist programmer role and their CTC. Every DSE or SES (both are the same) wants to promote themself in this role and in this article I will let you prepare to clear this path.
I am from the 2019 batch and this was the first batch of Infosys SES which later changed to DSE.
Read our previous blog for more info about DSE or SES
- Interview Preparation For Digital Specialist Engineer
- Things to learn before joining Infosys
- Complete blog about Digital specialist engineer
- Salary of DSE before and after training
- Mern stack stream complete flow explained
- My 4 months of experience in Infosys as a Digital specialist engineer
- Dot net training at Infosys
When will we get a chance to promote ourselves from SES/DSE to power programmer/PP?
After 1 year from posting to your DC, you will get a mail regarding the exam of power programmer the whole procedure will be of two rounds, out of the 1st round will be the coding round and the 2nd round will be a face-to-face interview.
For the first round, you will get three coding questions easy, medium, and hard.
If you are able to clear 2 questions out of 3 then you are 80% likely to clear that exam or I should say the first round.
Out of the difficulty level mentioned in the question paper sometimes the difficult seems easy than the easy and the medium one.
How many attempts we can give?
For us, there were 3 attempts to crack the power programmer exam but you might get more or less based on the need in the infy market standard.
Things to prepare for the exam
The preparation would be the same as we used to do during our college placements only with a small difference that, you also need to have a good understanding of our current Infosys project lifecycle, our role, contribution, and our need in that. Apart from that everything lies same as a college placement includes basic data structure like a graph, tree, stack, queue, etc however the chances of getting a question of tree and graph is rare but you can prepare for the worst-case scenario in order to crack the exam and from the algorithm, you can prepare dynamic programming, greedy algorithm.
You also need to have basic problem-solving skills in some coding platforms like hackerrank, HackerEarth, etc.
You can refer to some questions with solutions from geeksforgeeks as it has the best solution for the question with all possible solutions based on space and time complexity.
You need to focus more on a string and Array-related problem that will help you a lot.
2019 Batch conversion rate from SES/DSE to PP
The conversion rate was quite nice if we consider all three attempts it was around 70%.
What if you’re not able to clear the PP exam in all the attempts
The same thing happened to me I was unable to clear the 1st attempt, failed to give the second attempt, and was also not able to clear the 3rd one.
I was sure that I won’t be a PP and I heard that they will throw us out from the STG group, and the same thing happened to me, however, being in STG or not doesn’t make much difference if you’re planning to leave Infosys in near future otherwise if you decide to stay then you will be a Senior System Engineer and our next target or promotion level will be same as compare to regular fresher or System Engineer. that is technology analyst then technology lead then project manager and if you clear the PP exam you will be PP then principal architect and on.
Case study of a colleague who cleared PP exam
One of my colleagues has a very inspiring story who was able to clear the exam on the 3rd attempt, despite failing in the 2 attempts he kept patience and was consistent to clear the exam and finally he cracked the last one.
