Goldman Sachs Services Latest Java Selenium & Manual Interview Questions

Goldman Sachs Developer Interview Questions

Company: Goldman Sachs
College: BITS
Profile: SDE
Interview Type: On-campus
CTC: 13 LPA
Candidate: Mitesh Kumar Singh (CSE)

Interview Process:

Round 1 (Online MCQ):

Online MCQ Round with 4 sections. Time Allotted: 1 hr

Technical

• C,C++,JAVA and OOP concepts
• Questions were lengthy but with good concepts, they could easily be easily solved.

Aptitude

• Pie charts, statistics, etc.
• The questions in this section were quite tough.
• Pseudo Code for 2 algorithmic problems to be written
• A paragraph explaining why they should hire you.

Round 2 (Group Discussion/Case Study):

A group of 10 members.

Time Allotted: 25 Minutes

We were given a scenario of a drowning ship. A list of 12 persons of the different professions (say, engineer, doctor, captain, etc.) was given. Each person had a useful tool like a match stick, knife, etc. A boat could take 8 persons and leave them on an island. And a few other conditions were given. We had to save 8 persons out of 12. In our discussion, we had to come to a conclusion as to which 8 should be saved who could help sustain life after being saved.

Round 3 (PI):

Time: Approx 30 minutes

• The interviewer initially discussed my projects.
• Then he asked me a simple problem
• Find a given string in a file. (Take care that the given string may have spaces.)

In the end, he asked me a few questions about JAVA (E.g., JAVA vs. C++, a Memory leak in JAVA, etc.)

Round 4 (PI):

This time there were 2 interviewers.

• A gold bar puzzle: Since I had heard the puzzle before, I told them that I already knew the answer. They asked me another puzzle (Red, Green, Blue balls puzzle). I knew this one too smile emoticon. But this time they asked me to explain the logic which I did successfully.
• Few technical questions on OS concepts like memory management, Virtual memory, scheduling, etc. Few questions about Linux like the utility of grep command, etc. (I could not answer that well enough).
• Explain logic to iterate a directory and its subdirectories on Linux. I did it using dfs on the directory structure, though they wanted some sequence of Linux commands to do it.
• Approach on an algorithmic problem: Given N servers. Each server has a capacity. The total cost of connecting computers to servers is the sum of distances of computers from servers. So if a stream of computers is coming, how will you attach computers to servers such that the total sum of distances to all servers is minimum. They wanted to know if I would use DP or greedy logic, and why?

Round 5 (PI):

Again 2 interviewers

They asked 2 algorithmic problems.

• Given an array. Find a pair of elements whose sum = k. Expected Complexity: O(n*n)
• Convert a DLL to BST and vice versa.

HR Interview:

The HR interviews test your moral qualities like honesty, sincerity, loyalty, and team spirit by presenting you with a common situation.

I was asked about the arrangements I would make to organize my friend’s birthday party. I tried to consider all cases like inviting the close ones, ordering the cake, arrangement of music, etc. But the important point (which interviewer was expecting) was that being an organizer, I should order the flavor of cake which my friend likes and also order a veg cake if he/she is a vegetarian. He gave further situations in between to test my team spirit skills. An important suggestion for HR interviews could be that you should answer diplomatically rather than being blunt and speaking the truth. HR interviews also check whether you are adaptable to any given work condition or not.

Suggestions:

• Always give a brute force solution first as sometimes interviewers expect the most simple solution.
• Practice writing neat code on pen and paper.
• Interact with your interviewers during the interviews. Think aloud.

Cheers and thanks Softwaretestingo for providing a good collection of interviews to prepare in very less time 🙂

Check Also: Testing Interview Questions

Company: Goldman Sachs

Hi, I recently interviewed with Goldman Sachs and had 4 rounds of interview with them at their campus in Bangalore.

Round 1:

• Print all nodes at a distance k from a given node in a binary tree?
• randN function: which generates a random number in [1,2,3..N] with equal probability. Given rand5, write code for rand7 using rand5.
• Puzzle: Using all(8,8,3,3) and only operators(*,/,-,+), make 24

Round 2:

• How do you implement an LRU cache?
• Your current project in Company? A lot of questions from CV? The discussion went on for about 15 minutes?
• Then I had a lot of questions around javascript and java: about different design patterns and web services.

Round 3:

• A lot of questions around java, collections frameworks, multithreading, and so on. (This took a good 25-30 minutes )
• A strategy question. It would be asked, depending on which team you are being interviewed for. Mine was some apple seller problem. Her knowledge of real-world scenario helps. Advice is to observe things around you rationally.
• Write down the function to select a pivot element randomly in Quick Sort.

Round 4:

• He asked me what a data structure is, and why do we use one. Explained to him. He asked some real-life examples of stack and queue. All I could give him was programming examples, but when he insisted on real-life examples, I gave him some weird made up not so real-life example. :-p
• As we were talking very much on each question. He felt like talking more, and from tech, he went around for some biggest learning from a mistake/biggest achievement of life kind of questions. There were other questions, too, which I can’t seem to remember now.

He told me that he is done with the interview and If I had any questions.