Samsung R&D Interview Experience

Coding Round – Initially we had a coding round on cocubes. 

• They had given three coding questions and all three questions were not same for each candidate. There was shuffling in the questions but all of them were equal level questions. 
• The questions that I got were from the concepts of Linkedlist, Trees and a array greedy problem. One among them is easy and rest two are a bit medium level questions. 
• There will be no open test cases to check whether the code that we wrote was right or wrong. All the test cases are hidden test cases. So we must pay full attention while writing the code and should consider each and every corner test cases ( this is one of the most important factors that decides your selection ).
• Coding round went pretty well and lot of students had done all three coding questions. So, the team selected the 25-28 I don’t remember it exactly for the next round on basis of the coding round and the academic CGPA ( this is the time my CGPA helped me to be in the selection list ). After that we had two interviews on the next two days.

1st Interview – First interview was held for 40-45 minutes and they had shared the interview schedule a day before the interview. Interviews were taken on the Skype platform. 

• In this interview my interviewer had started with talking about my resume that I had already shared after coding round. 
• He had observed the achievements session of my resume and came to the conclusion that I code well. He told it directly with me and asked some theory concepts related to coding such as where does the code we write will be saved and is it volatile or non-volite memory and so on.
• Later he asked me about the concept that is related to Computer Architecture but I was not sure about the answer and told him what I knew and informed him that I was not prepared for the CS subjects as I am from ECE ( being honest is the most important in the interview ). 
• Then he asked to share my screen and told two coding questions and asked me to solve on the go. I had solved by explaining him each line that I code loudly. He was quite impressed with that and ended up the interview with a question whether I had any queries to ask. I had asked him about the projects that interns gonna work upon and work culture at samsung. He answered them and ended the call.

2nd Interview – 1st Interview results were out on the same day of interview and the selected students will be having their second interview on the next day. Nearly 20 were selected in the first round. 

• Second interview was completely different from the first interview. No coding and no resume related questions for me ( although one of my friends interviewer took 25min on the projects from resume ). My interviewer was quite encouraging and started to ask me questions related to the real world problems. He would explain me the situation and ask me the kind of data structure and algorithm that I would prefer for that situation in order to get the best result. 
• Mostly we had talked about the trees, graphs and trie data structure. It was really challenging and at the same time enjoying. Later on he had come up with a tricky puzzle and I was completely clueless about the puzzle but I never let him know that. I tried to solve it by explaining him all the possibilities and at last I had come up with the solution. He appreciated for my answer and explained me an another better solution. 
• I was quite impressed with that solution. Interview ended there and my waiting for the result begins.

Final Verdict – After interviews, results were out at 8 pm in the night and 18 students were selected and I was one among them.

Suggestions – Be honest with your interviewer and never give up too immediately. Calmness can really help you a lot.