Hello Everyone,
I would like to share,
My Recent Goldman Sachs Summer Analyst Interview Experience.
I got this opportunity off-campus through Engineering Campus Hiring Program.
Let's start from the beginning,
The applications started mid-August and after ~20 days we received invitation for Aptitude Test, I will not go into the details of the test as there are many resources available for it.
Few Days, Later:
(22nd Sept 2024) I solved 45-50 questions correctly in this and skipped the rest as there was negative marking, though I was not expecting to move forward as many of my friends said they solved 60-65 questions.
15 Days, Later:
(7th Oct 2024) I received an email that I was shortlisted for the technical test which was scheduled after ~1 month (coursework period).
About a Month, Later:
(3rd Nov 2024) I solved 2/3 coding questions (1st was easy, 2nd was med-hard, 3rd was very difficult to solve under the given time constraint) and almost all the MCQs.
I was confident that I would be shortlisted for the next round.
8 Days, Later:
(11th Nov 2024) I received the invitation for the interview. They were scheduled after ~15 days.
15 Days, Later:
(26th Nov 2024) Well this was the DAY,
I was the last in my breakout room for the interviews, I was moved to another room and few minutes later the interviewer joined. He told me to join the coderpad link and said that we won't be coding up the questions, just tell me the logic and approaches.
After my brief introduction, He gave me the first question:
Q1
There are 10 songs in a playlist and we want to play the each song randomly, but once a song is played it cannot be played until all other songs are played.
I started by discussing about the random song selection logic using the random function, then he cross questioned me a little about negative random numbers and storing the used songs, I thought this was still the discussion going on, but he said ok and moved on to the next question.
Q2
We are given a string and we need to find the first occurrence of non-repeating character in the whole string, I asked whether there are only alphabets, He said there can be any character it is not fixed. So instead of using an unordered map, I suggested that we should use map as in the worse case it could lead to O(n) TC, but then he told we can fix the character to some limit, So I switched to unordered map. Then after we discussed about the internal working of the unordered map (Hash tables) and he cross questioned me on collision in the hash table and its time complexity, I answered them and the interview was over.
This was not all.
There were interviews on the next day also.
Then I was told that the result will be forwarded on email by the end of the day. I had mixed feelings because of the first question, interviewer quickly jumped from that question, which I was not expecting. I felt that I answered the questions correctly. But later that day, I received the rejection email.
You guys were expecting a Happy Ending?
I think the rejection didn't had to do with my answers, But to the way I answered it. I wasn't going step by step during the discussion (But that's how a mind thinks solves bits and pieces and then merge them to get to a solution, The discussion ended against my odds).
Anyways,
Peace Out.