D E Shaw Interview Experience | Set 22 (Off-Campus)

I applied for DE Shaw off campus through their site.

Round 1 (Online round):

After a few weeks, a hackerrank link was provided for an online coding round. The coding round consisted of two questions, both of them were of medium difficulty. But implementing both of them in just 1 hour was quite an impossible task. I could not solve any of them fully, but made sure a decent number of test cases got passed in each one of them.

Round 2 (Code pair):

Probably the trick worked and I got a mail for a code pair round on hackerrank. The following questions were asked:

1. What is polymorphism?
2. In-depth discussion on virtual keyword, virtual pointer, virtual table.
3. Coin change problem with a slight modification: operations allowed: (n/2), (n/3) and (n-1).
4. Program to reverse a string.
5. Why is normalization done?
6. What is cascade delete?

I answered each one of them correctly and was informed of getting into the next round.

Round 3 (On-site):

Around 10-12 people were flown from their respective cities to their Hyderabad office. We were made to fill up some forms regarding basic details, and then I was the first one to be interviewed among all. A team of 2 people were present to take the interview for each of the on-site rounds. Following questions were asked:

1. Difference between http and https.
2. What are the various encryption algorithms?
3. How does encryption take place?
4. What is Dalvik VM (this question was asked because I had written Android in my CV)?
5. Difference between Java and Python.
6. Why is Java code able to run on different machines?
7. How would you find a loop in a linked list?
8. (Extension of the above question) How would you find the length of the loop if found?
9. Suppose you are given for each day the stock price of each company, for example on Day 1 Google: 60$, IBM 45$, … on Day 2 Google: 70$, IBM 43$, … and so on. You need to devise a data structure and a method to get the top k companies with highest prices.
10. (Extension of the above question) Now among these top k companies, devise a method to get the frequency of all the companies. For example, if the top k companies are: IBM, Google, IBM, Microsoft. Then, the frequency count should return: IBM-2, Google-1, Microsoft-1.
11. Design a Database Schema depicting the whole college scenario consisting of Department, Faculty, Courses, Students, etc.
12. (Extension of the above question) Using the DB Schema mentioned, write an SQL query to get the names of all those students who have scored 10 CGPA in at least 5 courses.

Round 4 (On-site):

After the first round was over, only 4 people were called in for the second round. The rest were kept waiting. Questions asked in this round were:

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sum-of-two-linked-lists/
2. https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/magnet-array-problem/0
3. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-excel-column-name-given-number/
4. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-excel-column-number-column-title/

Further rounds (On-site):

For me, no further rounds were taken after this, even though I believed all my rounds went very well. I got disheartened because there were people whose 2 more rounds had taken place (one HR round and one technical), while I just kept waiting like the rest.

Then, we all came back to our respective homes and after 2 days, I got a call from DE Shaw that I had been selected! 😀