Deutsche Bank Interview Experience for Software Engineer 2023

Deutsche Bank visited our campus around the second last week of July 2023. It was for the batch of 2024. The whole process was divided into 5 parts :

• Online Coding test
• Technical round-1
• Technical round-2
• Tech-Fit Round
• HR Round

1) Online Coding test

It consist of three coding questions. 1 Easy and 2 Medium Level.

First Question: Mary has baked K cakes. She wants to put candles numbered 1, 2 ,…,K. on the cakes (one candle on each cake) She went to the store to buy candles. The candle shop has a stack of candle boxes The shopkeeper is lazy and will only sell the candle on top of the stack each time a customer comes. Mary does not want to spend too much extra money yet she wants to buy the candles she needs. What is the minimum number of candles that Mary has to buy in order to have at least, the candles numbered 1, 2 ,…,K . All the boxes in the stack have one unique numbered candle. Candle[0] is at the top of the stack, whereas candle [N – 1] is at the bottom of the stack.

Second Question: John is playing a battle royale game in which the game consists of N heroes and M monsters. The powers of the heroes and the monsters are represented by arrays A and B respectively. A hero can defeat a monster if his power is greater than or equal to the power of the monster. A hero gains some number of coins corresponding to the monster he defeated. The coins after defeating a particular monster are represented by an array C of size M. The health of a hero doesn’t get reduced after defeating a monster. A monster can be defeated by multiple heroes. Determine the number of coins each hero can collect by defeating any monsters in the game.

I Don’t exactly remember the third one.

I solved 1 fully and two partially. Passed 6/10 and 8/10 testcases for the partially solved questions.

Got shortlisted with 49 other students out of 230 students.

2) Technical round -1

It was conducted in offline and in-person mode. The interviewer was one of the AVPs of Deutsche Bank. I carried my hardcopy of my resume to her. She took a minute to go through my resume. Questions asked after that:

• Can we have a small Introduction about you. (I talked about my 2 internships in that intro)
• Followed up and asked more about one of my internships.
• You have written Python in your resume, can you rate yourself in Python? ( I rated 8)
• Ok, So can you tell me what data types are present in python.
• Can you write the syntax for map data structure
• How can you access keys and values in map
• You have studied OOPs in you coursework even though you are from ENTC department
• Explain polymorphism and its real life example.
• What are abstract classes
• Write a class which uses virtual functions.
• Are you sure we can create an instance of abstract classes ( I mistakenly created instance in above asked question)
• What is a Constructor.
• Can you create a constructor in the class you just wrote.
• Create a member function in the class you wrote and call it in main.
• Do you know about destructor.
• Can destructor be overloaded.
• (Again took a look at my resume) Write me a program to reverse a string. ( Answering to my question she said any program that have least complexity, I offered two approaches)
• Are you aware about Exceptional handling.
• Can you write the syntax for throw-catch block (I couldn’t remember it at that time)
• Ok, So just explain me the use. (I explained very clearly by giving examples of API call)
• What do you understand by API latency.
• You have used GitHub?
• For what purpose do you use it personally
• How to initialize a local repository.
• Do you have any questions for me.

Out of 50, 29 were shortlisted and I was one of them. Overall I got stuck with 3-4 question but tried to answer them partially.

3) Technical round -2

I almost thought that I wont be shortlisted for this round because I didn’t answer few questions. Suddenly my name was called out for the interview, I didn’t have time to collect my thoughts. So this time interviewer was one of the VPs of Deutsche Bank. He went through my resume.

• Lets have a quick interview about you.
• What you know about ICs ( I am from ENTC as mentioned before)
• Ok then lets move towards your projects ( After I mentioned my interest is more oriented towards programming instead of ENTC subjects)
• Explain what you understand my websites frontend and backend communications ( Way of asking the question was different than mentioned here. I client and server side renderings in terms of reactjs and nodejs)
• What happens when we enter www.google.com in the browser (I tried to explain from htttps and http, but was interrupted and asked to explain the communication. I didn’t used GET, POST , DNS terms as I couldn’t collect my thoughts in a format. From this Interviewer kind of started becoming uninterested. And told me that “you should atleast know the things you are studying when you decided not to study your core(ENTC)”. It felt bad, even knowing this , I wasn’t able to answer the questions.)
• Explain about APIs. Do APIs exist even before the introduction of web programming. ( I couldn’t say anything for the latter question as I was still being feeling heavy for not answering that above question. He explained where and in what forms APIs exist.)
• What are Pointers.
• Difference between constructor and destructor. ( I said this line while explaining – “we use delete keyword to free the memory of member variables, and that delete keyword is used in destructor. And that destructor overloads the default destructor too.”)
• What is the need of delete keyword? Even If we delete the instance of class, it will also free the memory of member variables. ( Again couldn’t think clearly. When he started explaining by declaring an array with “new keyword”. I remembered the dynamic allocation and heap memory concept. He kept on explaining. )
• Started writing down 4 pillars of OOP, as I called out one by one. And Asked me to explain abstraction with real life example. (I got confused and explained encapsulation instead.)
• Do you know OOP. ( I said I learnt it from Saurabh Shukla’s channel. Interviewer : That is why your concepts are not clear. Learn from these books. He listed 4 books on the paper.)
• Do you have any questions for me. ( I requested him to ask few more question to me. As I already knew I performed really bad)
• He gave a problem statement and asked me to demonstrate it in form of OOP concepts basically classes. ( I used too much of brain and used inheritance and other concepts. But when the Interviewer told me the approach he would use. It was just a very basic single class. )
• You have this word “Design Decision” in your internship description, can you explain. (I did thoroughly.)
• Do you have any questions for me.

I was not shortlisted for third round.

Piece of advice :

• If you have time gap between your interviews, don’t think any negative points about your last interview.
• Stay calm and prepare for next interview. And before starting the interview take a deep breath and feel your presence of mind.
• If you are not able to answer a question, don’t let it affect the next question. Otherwise even though you know things, you wont be able to answer .