Details and Criteria:
- Years of Experience: 2 Years
- Prior Experience: Software Engineer in an MNC
- Position: Software Engineer (Analyst) role
- Location: Bangalore, India
The recruiter contacted me over LinkedIn. I currently have two years of experience working in an MNC. Hr called me and informed me about the process. A hackerrank test link was sent on email and was asked to complete the test in 3 days.
Round 1 Hackerrank Coding Round (2 Hours): It was a two-hour test and 2 coding questions were given. These questions were easy-medium level. I was able to solve both of the questions as I have already solved them earlier.
- Print number in ascending order which contains 1, 2, and 3 in their digits.
- Reduce the string by removing K consecutive identical characters.
Round 2 Coder Pad Round (1 Hour): Hr called me and informed me that I had cleared Hackerrank Round and asked few time slots to schedule Coder Pad Round. It was a one-hour coding round and was expected to code in front of the interviewer. The default coding language was Java. Questions were again the Easy-Medium level. I was able to solve both questions quickly as I have encountered them multiple times.
- Run-length encoding. (Easy).
- Find the median of two sorted arrays.
Hr called me and informed me that further 3-4 rounds will be video conference round and were scheduled on a weekday. I was given 4 days of time to prepare. The interview was held on zoom and the zoom link and coder pad link were shared.
Round 3 Video Conference Round (1 Hour): Two people took my interview. The interview started with the introduction of myself and the interviewers. They were very friendly, and we had a great time talking about each other’s work experiences.
Three coding questions were asked. Both questions were Easy-Medium Level:
- Given a number represented in string format, find the next greatest permutation or next greater number. Example: Input 12345, Output: 12354
- Implement getMin() for a stack.
- The intersection point of a LinkedList.
I had to explain how I arrived at the solution and also time complexities and space complexities were required. I had to write a clean and complete production level code. The interview ended with me asking about their experiences in Goldman Sachs.
Round 4 Video Conference Round (1 Hour 15 Min): This round was full of java, and project-related questions.
Explain your project in detail.
- Candy Crush problem: For a stream of integers, all consecutive same numbers appearing more than 3 times would get canceled out. At the end return the remaining sequence of integers. I was asked about the kind of data structure that I would use. The expected time complexity was O(n). Solution: I discussed the approach using stack and keeping track of the top of the stack, I was able to solve it in O(n).
- Shuffled playlist. The song which is playing currently will be played after all other songs in the playlist are played at least once.
- Different ways of iterating over a List
The interview ended with me asking about their experiences in Goldman Sachs.
Overall, the interview experience was positive. All the interviewers were friendly, and they were helping me in solving the problem.