BNY Mellon Interview Experience (On-Campus) 2023

Recently, BNY Mellon visited our campus (one of the topmost tier-2 institutes) and I got the offer, here is the interview experience.

First Round(Online Assessment): 4 questions to be solved in 90 minutes

Q1. Easy level: Given an array, sort the array according to a number of set values in the binary representation of those numbers. If two elements have the same number of set values, the value which occurs first in the input array will come first in the resultant array.I could solve this completely.

Ex:

Input: [1,2,3,4]
Output: [3,1,2,4]

I could solve this completely.

Q2: Medium level: I don’t exactly remember the question, but it goes by slot machine which was the straightforward greedy question with selecting a max number from all numbers(given as strings) from every i’th position horizontally.

Ex:

'757'
'145'
'986'

Will give answer:9+8+7=24 ( max value from all 0th positions of all elements, then 1st index, and then 2nd index).

I solved it completely.

Q3: Medium level: I don’t remember the question but it was a backtracking problem and I could solve  10 out of 15 test cases.

Q4: Hard level: Solved 5 out of 15 test cases with brute force, but couldn’t optimize the solution.

Those who had solved more than equal to  1-easy,1-medium, and 1-medium partial were shortlisted for interviews.

Second Round (Technical Interview): My interview was on 2 pm on the next day of an online assessment.

The interviewer introduced herself and asked me to introduce myself. In my intro, I had mentioned about hackathons I participated in, so she asked me to explain one of them, it was about NLP, so basic questions about NLP and Dialogflow. Then she asked me if I knew OOPS concepts, and I said yes. She asked me to present my screen and to list types of inheritances, and I listed all of them, she followed up with what is multiple inheritance, I told her, and then she asked me what is a diamond problem, and how we resolve it in CPP and java, then she asked me to change some of the lines in the code I had written on OneNote and asked what will be output now,(standard object slicing question), then what are copy constructors, what will happen if the constructor is private.

She asked me if I know DBMS, and I said yes, so she gave me a query of an employee with the third highest salary from two tables (simple join and nth highest salary logic).

Then we moved on to hackerrank code pair, where she set up a DSA question for me. The question was easy-medium level, given a linked list with binary values, convert it into a decimal number,  I solved 13 out of 14 test cases, for one test case, I gave three different approaches, but they all failed as the problem was long could only contain 2^63 and the linked list had a length of 64. The interview lasted for around 1 hr 10 mins

The interviewer was very friendly but I was unsure as I had wasted 15 minutes and still couldn’t pass that one test case.
I got called for the second round after 30 minutes.

Third Round(Technical Interview): My second interview was around 4 pm. But the interviewer had joined another link and there was some technical problem, so it got extended to 5 pm. The second round interviewer was was team leader something in bny. She asked about some basics of memory management, the difference between paging and segmentation and virtual memory,

She then gave me a HARD-level DSA question. You have given one vector of strings, arrange strings in such an order that no two strings with the same initials will come consecutively, I couldn’t run my code, but my approach was correct and the interview ended in 40 minutes.

I was unsure about the third round as the interviewer was not very friendly with me. She asked me if I had any questions for her.
So  I asked what was her role in bny and how it impacts bny’s end products.

Final Round (HR): I got called for an HR round around 9 pm which I was not even expecting, and my interview was scheduled at 11 pm. This interviewer was  very friendly and at the higher post with long experience,  He directly jumped into questions and asked me,

1. Why do you want to join bny.
2. How do you keep yourself updated about new technologies?
3. What is the thing you are most proud of about yourself?
4. Have you inspired anyone in your village? (it was a follow-up to my previous answer)
5. Then there were a few standard HR questions that I don’t remember,
6. Then he gave me a puzzle,
7. There are 19 people at the party, they handshake each other only once, how many handshakes happen at the party, I gave him an answer using the n(n-1)/2 formula, he was satisfied but gave me a suggestion that you should not ask me if the answer is correct but you should confidently say it,

Then he asked me if I had any questions for him, I first asked him if you are from a tech background or HR. He said tech and he is the manager for a certain division of bny. Then I asked him three questions(BNY’s tech related) which he liked very much and answered them in a way a fresher could understand.

Then finally I said, thank you for interviewing me, it was a great experience,
Then we said good night to each other and left the meeting.

Results came after 1 day at around 12:30 am, and I was selected.

Some tips:

1. “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” – Andy Dufresne, ‘Shawshank Redemption.
   It is one of the quotes I have always remembered before every interview I gave. I have a record of failing the highest number of interviews( and apparently, qualifying for the highest number of coding tests) in the on-campus process. This one quote is helping me to go through all odds which came before and those which are yet to come.
2. Practice-Practice-Practice: I started coding last September, I could not grab a good internship, but I became an expert on code forces and a 5-star coder on CodeChef.I have solved over 450 questions on gfg and 700+ questions on leetcode in one year. Keep hustling.

All the best….!