SAMSUNG R&D – BANGALORE (SRIB) | INTERVIEW EXPERIENCE – 2019 | ON-CAMPUS

Recently, Samsung Bangalore visited our college campus for the profile of Network Engineer.

Round 1: Online coding round

The very first round consisted of 1 coding question having 50 test cases to be solved within 3 hours. The languages that could be used were C, C++, and JAVA. They provided their own platform to solve and submit the solution code. (No STL allowed)

The question was: Airplane Problem

We have a game where an airplane is placed in the middle column of the bottom row. The airplane can move right or left by one step and in every step, the row moves down. When the airplane meets ‘1’ (coin) the number of points increase by 1 and when the airplane meets ‘2’ (bomb) the number of points decrease by 1. Whenever the airplane meets the bomb with score of 0 the airplane dies and game is over. The user has one detonate option throughout the game where he can detonate all the bombs in the next 5 rows. Find the maximum number of points (coins) that can be collected by the user. Number of rows 1 <= N <= 12. Return -1 if score < 0

Refer the question of round 1 from here

The selection criterion was, all the test cases should run correctly.

Out of nearly 280 students, 40 were selected.

Tip: Brush-up your programming skills and be comfortable with recursion and dynamic programming. Try to figure out the corner cases.

Round 2: Technical Interview – 1

This round started with “tell me about yourself”, followed by my resume, internship experience, and projects. They dived deeper into the project concepts. Try to start your project explanation with the following points :

1. Project name
2. Domain and technology of the project
3. Architecture and flow diagram of the project
4. The module in which you worked (if it is a team project)
5. The real-life use-cases and problems it is going to solve (optional)

He asked me what languages I am comfortable with. Then he gave me a problem of bit-manipulation. It was like this:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/toggling-k-th-bit-number/

Then he gave me a case and asked for its implementation approach. The case was :

Given Samsung’s smartphone, you have to implement an auto-dictionary suggestion type of feature like, if a user is typing SAP, he should get suggestions like APP, APPLE, NAP, etc.

I had an idea about the Trie data structure. So I explained to him how can it be implemented. He was impressed. (I came across this data structure when I was reading Samsung’s interview experiences at Geekforgeeks. Try to read all the interview experiences and study those topics. They are surely gonna help)

Next, he gave me a program code to write similar to this :

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-if-two-strings-are-same-ignoring-their-cases/

Then he asked me my favorite subject and asked the difference between internal and external fragmentation in memory and solutions.

The next question was the explanation of Minimum Spanning Tree and the difference between the shortest path problem and the minimum spanning tree.

Furthermore, he asked me about the OSI model of computer networks and the functions of each layer of the same.

He also wanted to check if I am aware of my college subjects and curriculum, so he asked me the names and units of subjects that I studied in my 3rd year.

Finally, he asked me if I had any questions. (Ask at least one question there)

Out of 40, 25 were selected.

Tip: Study subjects like OS, DBMS, Computer Networks, etc. thoroughly. You must know the basics of whatever programming language you choose. Don’t lie in your resume, If it is small and has less content, keep it that way but don’t exaggerate. You must have a good knowledge of whatever you mention in your resume. Try to answer smartly. Don’t answer in haste, take your time, think properly and answer. Don’t panic and stay calm, the interviewer will try to help you to reach out to the answer if you are stuck. Have a simple smile on your face.

Round 3: Technical Interview – 2

It started with “tell me about yourself” again, going more discussion on my family background. He then asked me my favorite data structure and I said stack, queue and linked list.

So he asked me to implement a priority queue (both enqueue and dequeue operations).

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/priority-queue-set-1-introduction/

I gave a naive approach which was time-consuming. So he asked me to optimize it and I used the heap for the same.

This round was pretty short as he asked me some general questions related to my studies and all those who reached this round were allowed to go for HR round.

Tip: Try to discuss your approach with your interviewer. It will give you a hint whether you are proceeding in a correct way or not. Also, try to overcome your mistakes of the previous rounds so that they could see progress in you. Knowledge of Object-Oriented programming will help.

Round 4: HR Interview

He also examined my resume and asked my family background. Then he asked me where could I see myself in the next five years. Then he asked me the difference between the OSI model and the TCP model and what are the functionalities of different layers of the TCP model.

Tip: Don’t underestimate the HR Round, it can turn the final result against you if taken lightly. Try to answer your importance in favor of the company you are interviewing for.

Out of 25, 19 were selected and I was one of them.

This article was contributed by Rajshree Gavel, NIT Raipur (2016-20)