Samsung had come on-campus for a 2021 summer internship in SRIB, Bangalore. The CGPA cut-off was 7.5. There were three rounds in the hiring process.
Round 1 (Coding round): The coding was conducted on cocubes platform and there were three simple questions. I do not remember the exact questions but there were one DP question and the question of one tree which were of easy level. I think the shortlist was based on how fast we have solved and how efficient our solution is. So submit as soon as you have coded the solution even you have time but make sure your solution is the most efficient. 24 people were shortlisted for the technical interview.
Round 2 (Technical interview): The interview was on Skype. The questions asked were
- Tell me about yourself.
- Tell me about an interesting project you have done and the challenges you had faced.
- Given an array, find if there exists a triple a, b, c such that a + b = c.
- Longest palindromic substring.
I have given brute force, hashmap, and two-pointer solutions for the first question. He asked me to code the two-pointer solution and I had done that. For the second question, I gave him the brute force and DP approach. He asked me if I can optimize it and I have given him a solution with O(1) space complexity. He then asked me to write the pseudo-code for that solution and I have done that. He was satisfied with my answers.
15 out of 24 were shortlisted for the next round.
Round 3 (Technical interview): This round was also on Skype. The questions asked were
- Tell me about yourself.
- Few in-depth questions from an ML project (Neural Machine Translation) I have done.
- What is the latest project you have done? Explain
- What does re.sub do?
- What is the use of cache memory?
- What is the need for a DBMS?
- What is MySQL?
- What is a pointer? Why do we use them?
- What is a function pointer?
- He gave me a few print statements related to pointers and asked me for the output. Something like this
- Implement two stacks using one array
- He had asked me to code it and I did that.
The entire interview was mostly based on CS fundamentals. They had asked KMP algorithm, OOPS concepts, questions on ML, and a few puzzles for other shortlisted people.
9 students were finally selected, and I was one of them.
Few tips:
- Make sure you are strong at CS fundamentals.
- Be prepared for your resume projects.
- Be confident and tell them you do not know instead of giving an incorrect answer.
- Think out loud and don’t stop talking while you are solving a programming question.
I would like to thank GeeksForGeeks for providing a platform to practice DSA and get to know the interview experiences.
ALL THE BEST for your interview!