Samsung Interview Experience for FTE (On-Campus)

Samsung R&D Institute Bangalore visited our campus in Feb 2022 to hire Final Year Students (2022 Batch) for the role of Networks Developer. 

Allowed Branches: CE, IT, EXTC, Electronics
Eligibility: 7+ CGPA

There were a total of 4 rounds: 1 Online Assessment, 2 Technical rounds, and 1 HR round.

Round 1: Online Assessment: It was conducted on the cocubes platform. We were given 2 coding questions to solve in 90 minutes. Both the questions were easy.

1. Rearrange a linked list into alternate first and the last element
2. Largest Sum Contiguous Subarray

I solved both the questions in 30 mins. After this round, 21 students were shortlisted for the next round

Round 2: Technical Round 1 (45 Mins): We have to schedule a google meet by ourselves and share the link in the form given. Make sure that the meeting link will not expire for a few days. The interview process may not get complete in a single day. Interviews were scheduled 1 week after the assessment and the first round started at 2 pm. My first round was scheduled at 3 pm but got postponed to 4 pm.
The interviewer was a senior developer in the Networks team.

• The interview started with my introduction.
• Asked about my summer internship experience and the tech stack I have worked on.
• Then he jumped into DSA and asked Detect loop in a linked list I told him the solution using hashing approach and about its time and space complexity. Then he asked me if I can optimize the solution. I gave him the two-pointer approach with its time and space complexity. He asked me to explain the approach by drawing the linked list in a notepad and then he asked how would I find the length of the loop. I told him the solution. He was satisfied and asked me to write complete code in any online C++ editor (including the creation of a linked list). I had to run the code and show if I am getting the correct output. He checked the code for the boundary conditions.
• Then he asked about the OOPS concepts. What is OOPS?  Types of inheritance.
• He asked if I have the overridden function with different return types in base and derived class and I use a base class pointer to the derived class object to call the function, which function will get called? I told him that I am not completely sure but it will give the error and explained to him why. He was not fully convinced and moved to the next question. Override a member function with a different return type
• What is a virtual function?
• What is the return type of print function in C?
• Difference between Semaphore and Mutex.

In the end, he asked if I have any questions for him. I asked 2 questions.
8 students were shortlisted for the next rounds.

Round 3: Technical Round 2 (1 hour): The round started around 6 pm.

• Introduction
• Asked me to explain one project mentioned in my resume. Asked why I choose a particular tech stack. Asked what is MVC architecture.
• nth node from the end of a Linked List
  Asked to solve in the single traversal. 
• Can we find the shortest distance between two nodes in the graph using DFS and BFS? Asked to explain the DFS approach.
• What is  trie data structure? why it is used? 
• What is the heap? Max heap Min heap, What is a priority queue?
• Difference between map and unordered map? Internal working of the unordered map? What is hashing?
• How will you hash a large number of strings into the hash table of size 10000? What is chaining? 
• Merge sort and quick sort? Time complexities of both. When should we prefer one over the other?
• Then he started with rapid-fire questions about all the technical skills I have mentioned in my resume. He asked 2, 3 questions on each.
• In networking: what are bandwidth and the difference between bandwidth and speed.
• In OS: Process, thread, different stages of the process, segmentation, paging.
• In DBMS asked what is indexing, Normalization, and Denormalization? Data types in SQL, between operators. And asked to write SQL queries.
• Queue using Stacks. Only the approach. 
• Reverse a linked list I told the iterative approach. He asked for the recursive approach and asked me to code the function on Notepad and dry run it on a test case.

In the end, he asked if I have any questions for him. I asked 2 questions. All 8 students were shortlisted for the HR round.

Round 4: HR Round (20 Mins): This round was scheduled 3 days after the technical rounds. 

• Introduction, general questions on academic performance, asked to describe my attitude in one line, strengths, weaknesses.
• Why Samsung?
• Asked about the role for which the recruitment is taking place. I explained the role and team as mentioned in JD. She was impressed with the answer.
• What is your technical expertise? Where you can improve?
• Have you talked with any Samsung employees about their experiences?
• And some general HR questions.

In the end, Asked if I have any questions. I asked a few questions. Then she told me that I have been selected for the role and will get the confirmation mail in an hour. On the next day, we received the mail. All 8 students were selected

Note:

• The interview schedule might get delayed or postponed. Stay calm and composed.
• Go through all interview experiences of the company on GeeksForGeeks.
• Practice DSA problems with time and space complexities of solutions.
• Even if you know the most optimal solution to the problem, always start with the brute force approach, discuss the time and space complexities and go on optimizing the solution.
• Always ask some questions to the interviewer at the end.

All the best!!