Samsung R&D Bangalore Internship Interview Experience (On Campus)

Round 1:

Round 1 consisted of 3 coding questions. Time given was 70 minutes. Coding test was conducted on Cocubes platform. Use of STL was allowed. There were various sets of questions. My questions were as follows:

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/program-for-armstrong-numbers/    (Efficient approach was needed)
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/sum-of-cousins-of-a-given-node-in-a-binary-tree/
3. Find the sum of all the left leaf nodes of the binary tree having right sibling.

Only basic test cases were visible during the test. It was explicitly mentioned that optimized solutions will be given more preference. Try to optimize your solutions as much as possible. Prepare trees well for clearing the first round of Samsung.

Total 9 people were selected for the second round. Luckily, I was one of them.

Round 2:

Our interviews were scheduled 2 days after the online assessment. Interviews started quite late at around 5-6 in evening. 

Interviewer was friendly. He started with asking about how Covid has impacted my life. 

He then asked a few questions about my projects mentioned in my resume. For eg. What is your project? What tech stack is used? Why did you use that tech stack? What was your role in the project?

He then started with coding questions which are as follows:

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-two-rectangles-overlap/
2. Implement queue using two stacks.
3. What is preorder, postorder inorder traversals? He then told me to give all three traversals of a binary tree. Then, he asked about the real life use of postorder traversal. On which I told him how compiler evaluates mathematical expressions by first converting it to postfix expressions and evaluate them. He asked me the code for postfix evaluation.
4. How to reverse a linked list?

He then asked if I have some questions for him. I asked about my feedback and he told that he was quite happy with my knowledge of data structures and algorithms. I asked a few company related questions and then the interview ended. 

Round 3:

Round 3 started at around 8-9 in the evening.

Interviewer was in the Samsung office and was ready to leave for home. So he looked in quite a hurry. He asked me to introduce myself. After that he asked about my projects and asked some standard project related questions. If you have web development project related to seat booking in your resume, then always be prepared for 2 questions:

1. If two users are accessing your webpage simultaneously, and select the same seat how would you resolve that issue?
2. If many people are accessing your web page, how would manage it efficiently?

He then started with coding questions which are as follows:

1. We have been given call records of a certain day at a call centre i.e the start time and end time of each call is given. Considering that calls occur at same time every day, we have to find the minimum number of operators needed such that no call is remained unattended and no operator is sitting idle. It is similar to the Number of Platforms needed problem.
2. Then he asked a small puzzle. We have 3 boxes. One contains red balls. One contains green balls. And the third one contains mixed ball. They all have labels on top stating the colour of the balls inside it. It is known that all the labels are wrongly placed. How many number of balls need to taken out to find the right label and the right box associated with it.
3. He asked me if I know about Trie data structure. He asked what is it, what is it used for, how is it implemented. He then asked if we have a phone book containing various names, how will you efficiently insert names in it to reduce the lookup time. Then he asked time and space complexity of it.
4. We are given two linked lists and pointers to their head. Find if these linked lists intersect.

He then asked if I had any questions for him and the interview ended. 

6 people were selected for a 2 months internship.

Be confident in what you are answering. Even if you do not know the answer, just tell the interviewer your approach and he’ll surely give you a hint. Even after that if you didn’t get the answer, do not panic. Interviewer judges you based on your approach to the solution even if you do not reach to the final solution. 

All the best!