Wells Fargo visited our campus to hire pre-final year students for summer internship roles. Around 130 students were shortlisted based on their CPI. There were four rounds, first was an online test, followed by 3 rounds of interviews.
Round 1: Online Test
This round was conducted on the AMCAT platform. There was no negative marking attempting all the questions was mandatory. It had 3 sections:
- Section 1: Verbal Section: 10 questions to test your basic verbal skills like finding grammatical errors, choosing the most appropriate phrases, and passage-based questions. 15 mins were allotted and free navigation among the questions was prohibited. Questions were fairly simple and one could easy to understand.
- Section 2: Business Aptitude: 14 questions based on stocks and basic economics, just to test your logical reasoning and decision making. No prior knowledge of stocks was required as such. 25 mins were given and free navigation was again prohibited.
- Section 3: Coding: There were 2 coding questions that were fairly easy. The summary of the 2 questions is as follows:
Given a string of length N, which contains ‘1’ , ‘0’ and ‘?’ . Return all the binary strings that can be formed by replacing the ‘?’ with ‘0’ or ‘1’.
Input: 11??1 Output: 11001, 11111, 11011, 11101 Constraints :1<=N<=13
Looking at the constraints it was clear that this is a Backtracking question.
Given an integer N, how many strings, containing only ‘(‘ and ‘)’ where ‘(‘ had value +1 and ‘)’ had value -1, can be formed such that the sum of the value of its characters is equal to X.
Input: N=4 , X=2 Output: 4 Constraints: 1<=N<=1000 -1000<=X<=1000
This was a basic P n C question.
I was able to solve both questions correctly. Around 30 students were shortlisted for the Interviews.
Round 2: Technical Interview (40-45 mins)
This was held on Zoom. The interviewer first introduced himself and asked me for an introduction. He was really polite and chill and made me feel comfortable. Then he looked at my resume asked me about the projects that I had done. This went on for 10 mins. Then he gave me a very basic question regarding pattern printing, the kind which we do in our first year C programming course. This was just introductory so I told him the logic and he was satisfied. Then he asked me about the Data Structures I am familiar with. I said Arrays, Stacks, Linked Lists, Graphs, and Trees. He then asked me 1-2 basic very questions like Stack uses LIFO and what is a left-skewed tree. He then asked me whether I am a backbencher, and said he himself was a backbencher in his days. Then he asked me if I had an Idea about self-balancing trees. I said I knew the theory part but wasn’t confident regarding the codes. He moved on and asked me to explain and write the pseudo-codes for Insertion, Merge, and Bubble sort. I explained it and he was satisfied.
He then asked me whether I had any questions from him. I asked him 2-3 questions and he seemed to be impressed by them. This concluded the first round. About 21 people were shortlisted for the second round.
Round 3: Technical Interview with Senior Manager (40-45 mins)
This round was again held on Zoom. He asked me for my Introduction and talked about the technologies that I had mentioned in my resume and asked me why I used these technologies. After that he asked me a coding question:
- There is a frog on one side of a river. There are N floating stones in the river and the frog wants to reach the other side of the river. The condition is that at every step the frog can either skip the next stone or go to the next stone. This means that if the frog is at stone 1, he can go to stone 2 or skip stone 2 and directly go to stone 3.
We have to print all the ways in which the frog can reach the other side of the river.
I suggested a backtracking solution and coded it. He seemed to be satisfied with my approach. He then asked me how many ways will be there for N=3, I said 5, and for N=4 I said 8. He asked whether there is a pattern in this and I couldn’t understand what he was trying to say so I said No. (After the interview I realized that he was hinting towards the Fibonacci type of pattern as for N=1 -> 2, 2 -> 3, 3->5, 4->8).
He then asked me whether I had any questions for him, I asked him 1-2 questions and the interview ended. Around 14 people for shortlisted for the next round.
Round 4: HR Interview (10-15 min)
This was a telephonic interview. He called me directly on my phone and started the conversation with where I lived. He was pretty chill and I built a great rapport with him. We talked about several things, about the work-life in Wells Fargo, etc.
The next day results were announced.
Verdict: Selected
PS: Always be confident. This is very important. The interview is a different game altogether and coding alone will not help you to crack them. Always be honest with the interviewer and be yourself. Think of it as a conversation and not as a Viva session. And after the interviewer is done always ask him questions regarding the company etc. This puts in a positive impression.