D E Shaw Interview Experience | Set 20 (For Q&A Profile)

Was called through a referral from a friend already working there.

• Round 1 (Telephonic)
  • Tell me about yourself
  • Explain one of your projects
  • Questions on pointers and a long list was given comprising of binaries 0/1 in random order. The task was to achieve longest possible alternating sequence possible without using extra space. I gave a solution in quadratic time then optimized to linear.
  • Question on stack, reversing a string without using for loop and reversing a stack without using auxiliary space.
  • Included few more questions but don’t remember them
  • Interview went for 1 hour.

  After 1 week I was given a call and asked to come down to their office for interviewing.

  I reached at 12 and had about 5 rounds of an hour each

• Round 2(on-site)
  • Tell about yourself
  • Had some discussion on projects I had done throughout bachelors and masters
  • Was given a list of numbers had to find the number which occurs twice in the list
  • One scenario in which a reporting of alarm happens each time the memory occupied by a process crosses some mark, had to minimize the number of alarms reported as it would not be feasible alarming the user each time the memory was above threshold(using patterns).
  • Given a number of digits finding the next possible maximum number using those digits
• Round 3
  • Tell about yourself
  • Jumped to questions had to find the number which occurred only once(others occurred twice and consecutively) in a given list of numbers, did it in linear tried for sublinear solution finding a solution.

  Some use cases for testing scenario
  Given a complex database make testing scenarios so as to ascertain the durability of the database.(had to deal with finding possible shortcomings in the system)
• Round 4
  • Tell about yourself
  • Implement Stacks using single queue
  • Given a string, find number of strings using ‘n’ distinct alphabets eg. given aabb and n=2, answer=aab, abb, ab and aabb
  • Some more questions on string permutation and combination
  • Asked oops concepts and compare java with c++
  • Asked a few questions on Unix scripting
• Round 5
  • Tell about yourself
  • given a list of size n find should have numbers from 1-n, but a number occurs twice and other number doesn’t occur. Find both the numbers in linear time.
  • A leaf grows twice the size it is yesterday.how many days would it cover half the pond, given the number of days in which it covers the whole pond.
  • A few more questions in do not remember
  • I was comfortable in Java so asked concepts of java here and there and other oops concepts.
• Round 6 HR (Finally 7:00 pm)
  • was given a task to make a placement portal what technologies would you use I answered it using html, css and php etc
  • Asked to estimate the number of people playing football in india on guess
    and was asked to do the same on estimate
  • horses and races puzzle, I told I had already seen the problem so the hr twisted the problem here and there.
  • about yourself, strength and weaknesses
  • Some personal questions
  • About the role and few details of the company.

All in all the interviewers were quite knowledgeable and kept on hinting a bit as and when i used to get stuck and asked for any questions I had about(Interview, company etc). Overall it was exhausting but good experience.

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All Practice Problems for D-E-Shaw !

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