D E Shaw Interview Experience | Set 18 (On-Campus)

ROUND 1:
About 250 students having (8 or 8.5 cgpa) cutoff were shortlisted for an online test in Hackerrank. It consisted of 3 sections-

Section 1: One programming question, which was quite simple, many test cases were based on end cases. (20 minutes)

Section 2: General aptitude, 10 questions which was difficult for most of us. I could get two correct. It was +2 and -0.5 for each question, questions were really long, related to probability and took a long time to solve. Though I wasn’t sure about few other questions I’d marked 4 more and got only 2 marks in that entire section.(20 min)

Section 3: Technical Aptitude, 5 questions related to networking, os, unix. It was easy if your basics were strong.

After round one, 17 students were shortlisted for interview. It started the next day from 9:30.

ROUND 2:
INTERVIEW 1:
This round was technical, the interviewers were really cool and made me comfortable by asking what I thought about the marking scheme and DE Shaw. My resume was only one page and they were impressed by it (I’d specified only 3 of my main projects and had given one or two line description regarding each project).
They asked me to tell me about myself and my project, so I started explaining, and it went on for 30 min, with their questions. Next they started asking many questions related to networking, os, input-output and cao. They asked some general questions about BIOS, CMOS, file systems etc. It was more like a discussion and went smoothly, they mainly saw how much work you’d done in your project and how much did you know.

INTERVIEW 2:
This was HR round, people really chilled in this round too, they asked where am I from. What’s my favorite food, hobbies etc. They later asked to tell something more and interesting. This went on for 30 minutes.
After the two rounds 3 moved on to the third and final technical round.

INTERVIEW 3:
They asked if I was tired. Now since the first round was on my project, they asked my language of preference, it was java. A lot of questions on core java topics. They had given few scenarios to which I’d to construct a class. Since I didn’t know the exact answers for few scenarios, I told them my approach about how I thought it could be solved. They asked few programming question, and asked me to improve the complexity and do it in other ways. Puzzles were also asked. Since I didn’t have any database background, they didn’t ask any questions on that.

All Practice Problems for D-E-Shaw !