De Shaw Developer Interview Questions
Interview Experience of DE Shaw Hyderabad
College: IIIT Allahabad
DE Shaw India Software Pvt. Limited has 3 profile viz Software Developers, QA Developer, and System Administrator. The selection procedure consisted of three rounds of viz. Written (mainly quantitative, C, C++, Java, Data Structures and Algorithms.
The written test is the toughest part which consisted of questions from every field. The 20 Questions in the aptitude section were a tough and most important part to get through the round. The next section consisted of 35 Questions from each and every field of computer science.
This section needed a good selection of questions to solve. Because it was impossible to attempt the whole paper. The third section consisted of 1 algorithm question (subjective). The fourth section was picture writing.
De Shaw Technical Questions:
- Write down the network layers?
- What is MAC Layer?
- What is MAC Address? How many bits does it consists of?
- What is an IP Address? How many bits does it consist of?
- What is a global IP Address and Network Adress Translation?
- Explain Checksum error correction.
- What is a 3-bit parity?
- How many trailing zeros are there in 100!?
- There are 25 horses and 5 tracks without a timer, how many minimum races are required to determine the winner?
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Interview Process with DE Shaw India is very lengthy and it involved nearly 5 rounds for me. Even though I heard so many reviews there would be huge work pressure and that the employees will have to work for nearly 12 hrs daily, I decided to give it a go-to see how the process will be.
DE Shaw Round 1:
Asked basic core java questions, SQL Index & Query related, covered a few questions on Servlets like persisting count object in Multi-threaded servlet environment and ended the interview round asking few puzzles. After telephonic, they scheduled a face-to-face interview for me and I was surprised when HR told me that they would conduct 3-4 rounds that day itself after reaching their office.
DE Shaw Round 2 – F2F
Started the round asking How to find the closest square of a given number and print the root of the square. The interviewer was very cool and gave me a hint to use a binary search to get the solution when I showed him a trivial solution that has more time complexity than binary search. I asked one more simple question like finding the row with max no of 1′s in a sorted MxN matrix. Finished the round asking questions on Thread joins, multi-threading in java, Serialization of static vars, etc.
DE Shaw Round 3 – F2F
This round was more concentrated on the things which I am currently working on at my current company – asked questions on the architecture used in our application, Restful services & Session Management/ User Authentication across multiple servers operating simultaneously.
DE Shaw Round 4 – F2F
This time a guy and a girl came together for interviewing me and I was thinking like how hard the round will get now! They started off asking questions on XML & JSON Serialization differences, Data Structure differences, Circular references in XML serialization, etc.
Then asked me to write an algorithm to find the Nodes at a distance D from a Node with value ‘n’ in a binary tree. Since they have already read the solution for that when I came up with different value checks in my solution they got confused and suggested changes to make it look like the solution they have received. Later, I asked me to write a class code for different Vehicle types and calculate their Metric value based on no of wheels property.
In the end, they asked me to write a method in which the User will be able to provide the method implementing the logic for calculating the metric value at run time. I did not understand the question and it’s still confusing for me. I told them that I would use the wrapper method over the 3rd Party method provided by the user for which they did not agree to say that would be a static solution.
Round 5 – F2F
This round mainly focused on design patterns and asked me which is my fav pattern and why, concentrated a bit on serialization, garbage collection, etc. Later asked to design a Ladder data structure and an algorithm related one on sorting the courier packages for a Robot to place them in a holder based on their destination and sort the packages by size in a pyramid shape so that small boxes would be on top always.
They will ask you to write code for each solution in all rounds and even if you miss a syntax or return type, they will spot it right away. It would be really hard when you lose touch writing code manually using Eclipse.
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Company: DE Shaw
Off-campus (Bangalore) (0-1 yr experience)
Role: Software Developer
DE Shaw Round 1: (Written Test)
- 20 Aptitude – Basic Quantitative Apt questions
- 20 Technical – C, C++ & JAVA related, Finding output, Basic Concepts
DE Shaw Round 2:
- find maximum length BST in a given binary tree?
- Write an algorithm to find the absolute max subsequence of an array containing both positive and negative numbers in O(n) time?
- Given an array eliminate the duplicates and print it. Linear time complexity?
- Balancing of Btrees / AVL trees?
DE Shaw Round 3:
- Two cops and a robber are located on opposite corners of a cube and move along its edges. They all move at the same rate. Is it possible for the cops to catch the robber? [Each of the 3 people can see each other at all times and can react instantaneously to each other’s movements. Stopping is allowed.]
- In some tournaments, 139 teams have participated. The tournament is knock out. what is the number of matches to choose the champion to be held?
- OS concepts – Threading, Deadlocks, Paging, etc
- Databases Questions – Transactions, ACID, etc
- project details in your resume?
DE Shaw Round 4:
- Given a 7mt long gold bar, need to cut and give to a worker for 7 days (1 meter long) How many min cuts?
- Write an algorithm to mirror a given Binary Tree?
- Find the next largest int of a given int such that it has the same number of 1′s in binary?
I hope this Helps!
If you would like to contribute, mail us your interview experience at softwaretestingo.com@gmail.com. We will like to publish it on SoftwareTestingo and help other job seekers.
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Location – Bits Pilani Campus
Criteria: Cs/IT/ECE And CGPA min of 7.0[CSE] .For ECE =7.5
- E. Shaw generally prefers computer science branch students but they’re not as strict as Amazon or Google and for CS students it was only 7.0. Luckily, my CGPA was above the cutoff and I was allowed to sit for the process.
Initially, they took an online round but due to some network problems, they had to scrap it. The next morning, they came up with a paper-based round. There were 2 sections. One was aptitude and one was coding, both being objective type.
The aptitude section was as lengthy as difficult. No one could have solved all 30 questions in 30 minutes’ time. In fact, I was only able to attempt 10. The next 40 minutes or so was reserved for the coding test. The questions they asked covered almost all the topics they mentioned in their pre-placement presentation.
But the maximum number of questions was related to getting output or finding errors in C, C++ and JAVA codes. The questions they asked from theoretical subjects were more or less the basics and easy. In those questions (which were quite a few in number), you will be given a huge chunk of code with some part missing and you have to identify which snippet among the options best fits in there. Sometimes it’s given what the code is supposed to do, but in some questions, it was also your task to find out.
So I think the differentiating factor is how well your actual coding skills are. And you need to know these 3 languages at least – C, C++, and JAVA. Again, similar to the aptitude section the coding section was also very long with some programs extending up to 1 or more pages. I’d recommend to skip those programs initially and jump to other easy problems first. Then if you have time, you can come back and attempt them.
At the end of the coding round, they had one special subjective test in which they asked you to write the full code in any language for the given problem statement. In my case, the problem was: “Given a tree, find the depth of the largest binary search tree it contains.” I know it sounds simple enough but only until you start coding it. And while writing codes of such problems, make sure to display your data-structures and algorithmic skills and not your knowledge of STL libraries.
Even if you’re not able to solve the problem and you used some complicated data structures (by using, I mean you created them from scratch without any help from STL libraries) and some good algorithms, then they are likely to appreciate your coding skills if not your problem-solving skills. And just a hint although I think you already know this – BST are the favorites of all software companies. Overall, I sat for 2 companies including Amazon and both of them had a coding problem related to BST only.
Anyways, then there were usual HR questions like your hobbies, interests, family background, history of my town, etc. He did ask me some technical questions also like on seeing the word ‘Hacking’ in my resume, we started discussing upon hacking, its types, and laws related to it.
They started off with puzzles, which were quite easy and common ones. Then only after 2 puzzles, they started asking me about my favourite subject and language. I told them OS, Networks, and C++. But instead, they asked me all about Java! I kept telling them I hadn’t revised Java but that didn’t help.
They’ll ask some question and I’ll write the code in C++ and they would ask me to convert it to Java. They’d also ask the equivalents of C++ OOP concepts in Java. It’s not that I know nothing of Java, I have actually done a lot of coding in it, but that day and time, I was totally unprepared. So I kept guessing a lot based on my poor memory and later to my surprise, I found I got many of them right.
They also asked some design questions in which they asked me to write the class and related functions (just the prototypes) for implementing a parking lot management system. Then there were questions on hacking and security. They also asked about the network problem they faced the previous day when the online round was going on, due to which they had to scrap it.
They asked what could be the reason behind it and what could be the solution. Overall, again the majority of the questions were the coding type with C++ concepts like virtual functions, JAVA OOP, and design problems. This round went on for 15-20 minutes past 1 hour or so.
Finally, after a few hours, I was called for my last interview round. It was more like a casual round in which the D.E.Shaw associate director was taking my interview. The first thing he said was “I just wanted to meet you once myself” and he asked a few HR questions again. He asked me if I had any higher studies plan, my strengths and 2 weaknesses, why their company, etc. It was a cool round with the atmosphere also easy and it went on for just 20 minutes or so.
Technical Questions Summary :
- What is the difference between C and C++?
- What is inheritance?
- What is the difference between default and copy constructor?
- What are the access specifiers?
- What are library functions?
- What is the difference between DML and DLL?
- What is the difference between primary key and a unique key?
- What is the use of Cursor?
- What is a stack?
- What is an Assembly?
- What are class access modifiers?
- What is serialization?
- What is the purpose of Normalisation?
- What is the difference between Truncate and Delete?
- What is the difference between DBMS and RDBMS?
- What is Recursion Function?
Thanks, Subhajit Ganguly for contributing this article. If you would like to contribute, mail us your interview experience at softwaretestingo.com@gmail.com. We will like to publish it on SoftwareTestingo Blog and help other job seekers.
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