Goldman Sachs Interview | Set 3

Goldman Sachs visited our campus for both Full Time and Interns. I am going to share the experience for Full Time.

• 1^st Round:
  • 15 questions: Quant
  • 25 technical Questions (C,C++,DBMS,networking,OS)
  • 45 minutes for both..there was sectional cut-Off
• Coding round (two questions):
  1. Check if duplicates exist in an array of N which has range 1 to N.
  2. Find a pair of elements in an array that sum up to a given Value K.

  We were supposed to do coding questions in 30 mins, there was no compiler.
  Finally a stupid “Essay” –“Why I am a good fit for Goldman Sachs?” (10 minutes)

  
  
  

  Total 7 people got shortlisted from 1^st round

• 2^nd Round: Group Task:
  They gave us a hypothetical situation, that a ship is sinking, it has only one lifeboat and its capacity is only 8 and there are 12 members on the ship and each member has a different profession and has a tool or an instrument that can be used for their survival.
  We need to discuss and select 8 people out of 12. (Basically you have to fight for your choices and convince others).
  4 got short listed after this round
  
  
• 3^rd Round: Duration (2hrs), Technical:
  1. How JVM works? (He asked internals)
  2. What do you do in your free time?
  3. Pattern matching question.. He was not satisfied with KMP algorithm..then I told him Trie..he asked me to implement Trie…(code)
  4. How would you search a file in Linux I told him grep and sedcommads…he was ok with it.
  5. When a message arrives at network interface card what exactly happens after that, and what is Operating system’s role in it?
  6. He asked me some questions in Perl..he wasn’t that good with Perl language …he was nodding his head with whatever I was telling him.
  7. Minimum window problem of strings. (we have to search all characters of a string that occur in another string with minimum window)
  8. Some simple questions on Python. (I mentioned it when he asked me what are the languages you have learnt)
  9. Which one is more efficient a Join operation or a nested query.
  10. Given a set to 3 tables transform these up to 4th Normal form….even I don’t know how I managed to do it. (m not that good with databases)
• 4^th Round: (Duration 1hr 45mins), Technical:
  For this round previous guy sent a guy who knows Perl this round was majorly on Perl and UNIX commands.
  1. Tell me about yourself.
  2. Given a file with business Date and contents. Extract the date(Validate it) and count all the other records in the file. (he was focusing on some basic pattern matching skills in Perl).
  3. Check if a given IP address is valid or not. (Do it in Perl using Regular Expressions).
  4. Check if a BT is BST or not.
  5. There are 12 rats, 11 of them are trained to eat at a fast rate except one. With the minimum number, if bread loaves I need to identify the slow rat.
  6. The classic puzzle to find where is the 1 rupee when 3 friends visit a restaurant and pay 10 Rs each
  7. Write a Perl and awk script to get the permissions of a file or a directory. (this was the easiest)
  8. Given a BST but two nodes have been swapped, I was supposed to identify the nodes…then he asked me to rectify it as well. (code)
  9. Some operating system questions, virtual memory, why we use virtual memory, File system related questions.
  10. Project related questions.
  11. He asked me do I know about Object Oriented python. (I said yes)..he didn’t ask any question about it.
  12. Use Linux commands to find 10 most frequently occurring word in a file.
      (sort –filename | unique –nc | head -10 | awk {print $2})

  (I think I nailed this round)
  =

• 5^th Round: (45 mins), Technical:
  1. How will you detect a cycle in a graph?
  2. Why Goldman Sachs?
  3. Given two stacks implement a Queue. (code was required).
  4. Give me “Mathematical Model” for Bubble sort… I was confused about what is a mathematical model. I asked him does he want the finite automata or workflow sort of answer…he said no, I want a single equation like (a+b)² =a² + b² + 2ab this formula works for all values of a and b..he wanted me to come up with one line formula…I gave him one..he was satisfied
  5. Now he asked to give a mathematical formula for above stack Queue question(ques #3 above)…I couldn’t come up with a single line equation.

All Practice Problems for Goldman Sachs !