D E Shaw Interview | Set 6 (Off-Campus)

Off-Campus recruitment process. I was contacted by a recruitment consultancy.

Round 1:
There were 3 sections – Apti, MCQ based on Java question + C++, coding each for 20 min.

Aptitude exam too difficult at least as student I had never prepared for aptitude round even in college as I was not interested in preparing for CAT therefore I found it too difficult. However, students who have prepared for CAT exam may find it easy.
Even more important point to note is that they don’t even evaluate Aptitude round as I have made it through the written round twice without marking a single answer on MCQ. Though I used to do some random rough work on the question paper . Because of my experience I am inclined to believe that the aptitude round is just to make a candidates feel stressed. Difficulty level was 6 out 5. 5 being the highest difficulty level.

Section B was the technical MCQ round in which question were asked from various topics like C-enum, recursion, stack and queues, Least Recently Used memory allocation, nested union. Java – Overriding, abstract functions, serialization, one networking question based on TCP protocol something based on congestion window. I was able to solve 17-18 questions. Difficulty level was 3.4 out of 5. 5 being the highest difficulty level.

Section C :- You are given the data of reported and manager. There is a company which wants to reduce the hierarchy level. To do the same, the manager who has only one reportee , the manager will be moved to another department and that single reportee will be moved under the manager of reportee’s manager.

Ex

Reportee	Manager
A	B
B	C
D	C

In the example above since B has only one reportee A, then B will be moved to another department and A’s reporting will be moved under C.

Round 2: Re-evaluation of Section C

Round 3: Started with the discussion why do you want to join DE shaw. Since prior to my current company, I was working with a finance based company so they asked why do you want to come back to finance base company.So they asked my about debentures, bonds, mortgages and other financial jargons.
Algorithm based questions :
1.) How will you find 3 numbers in an array which sum to a given number
2.) You are given in and out time of trains, how many minimum number of tracks are required.
Discussion about my projects.
Internal fragmentation v/s external fragmentation.
Write a SQL query to find employee with third highest salary, without using TOP or inner query.
Another query to find the department which has maximum number of employees.
Discussion of Abstract classes V/s Interfaces and why multiple inheritance cann’t be done in Java but can be done in c++.
Can a main function return Boolean rather than an int in main function.
What makes Java platform independent.

Round 4: I am not sure whether it was HR or another F2F, may be it was their call depending on a particular candidate.
Though I would like to add a few questions which other candidates were asked like how will you divide a triangle into equal area triangles. What are register variables . Keep a track of minimum element in a stack.

For more details or questions, please comment below.

All Practice Problems for D-E-Shaw !