Samsung Interview Experience for R&D (SRI-B) | On-Campus 2021

Samsung conducted an internship hiring process virtually. It was of total 3 rounds. The Online test was conducted on 24-12-20 and interviews were held on 28-12-20. The cutoff CGPA was 7.5

Round 1 (Online Test 70min): It was held on Cocubes. 3 coding questions were asked

1. Question-related to sorting an array of positive and negative integers.
2. Find the total ways to reach the nth stair with at-most m steps.
3. Simple DP problem.

Questions were relatively easy to solve, but they expected your code to be optimized and internally further hidden test cases were executed. 21 people were shortlisted out of approx. 300 students.

Round 2 (Technical Round 1): The interview began by talking about my projects and the work I had done. I explained my projects and told them my interest in JAVA and application development. We also spoke about my paper I was trying to get published and spent a good amount of time discussing that project. Then we moved on to a few DSA questions. 

• Time complexity of recurrence relation T(n) = 3T(n-1) where T(0)=1.
• 1 more simple question to find time complexity where multiple for loops are nested.
• Detect loop in the linked list.
• Spiral traversal of a tree.

The interviewer basically asked for my approach and if I did not explain properly, I was asked to write pseudocode and explain. In the end, he asked if I had any questions for him and I asked how is life working in Samsung, how long he was working and in which domain. The interview went well, and I was called for the next round.

Round 3 (Technical Round 2): The interview again began with my resume but it was very exhaustive. While my friends were asked about both resume and DSA concepts, my interview focused entirely on my resume. I had done a project on distributed computing and the interviewer asked me an application question on multi-threading and synchronization. It was quite difficult because I was trying to explain my approach and I couldn’t make out if the interviewer was happy with my approach or not. Then he asked to design a contact database without the actual use of DBMS in java. Again I tried to explain my approach but it was tough. The interview ended and I thought I would not get selected. It was difficult, and I was not satisfied with my performance.

Later that night, I got informed by my college placement cell that I was selected. A total of 8 students were selected at the end.

Tips:

• The online test is of medium difficulty. Many would get all the 3 question pass basic test cases. Make sure you try to optimize your code as much as possible. It matters.
• Try to communicate your thoughts to the interviewer. Be open to what you know and what you don’t. You would save a lot of time.
• Trust yourself. I honestly didn’t feel that I would get through round 2 but I guess I must have performed well.
• And yes, confidence is the key.

All the best !!