D E Shaw Interview Experience | Set 20 (For Q&A Profile)
Was called through a referral from a friend already working there.
- Round 1 (Telephonic)
- Tell me about yourself
- Explain one of your projects
- Questions on pointers and a long list was given comprising of binaries 0/1 in random order. The task was to achieve longest possible alternating sequence possible without using extra space. I gave a solution in quadratic time then optimized to linear.
- Question on stack, reversing a string without using for loop and reversing a stack without using auxiliary space.
- Included few more questions but don’t remember them
- Interview went for 1 hour.
After 1 week I was given a call and asked to come down to their office for interviewing.
I reached at 12 and had about 5 rounds of an hour each
- Round 2(on-site)
- Tell about yourself
- Had some discussion on projects I had done throughout bachelors and masters
- Was given a list of numbers had to find the number which occurs twice in the list
- One scenario in which a reporting of alarm happens each time the memory occupied by a process crosses some mark, had to minimize the number of alarms reported as it would not be feasible alarming the user each time the memory was above threshold(using patterns).
- Given a number of digits finding the next possible maximum number using those digits
- Round 3
- Tell about yourself
- Jumped to questions had to find the number which occurred only once(others occurred twice and consecutively) in a given list of numbers, did it in linear tried for sublinear solution finding a solution.
Some use cases for testing scenario
Given a complex database make testing scenarios so as to ascertain the durability of the database.(had to deal with finding possible shortcomings in the system) - Round 4
- Tell about yourself
- Implement Stacks using single queue
- Given a string, find number of strings using ‘n’ distinct alphabets eg. given aabb and n=2, answer=aab, abb, ab and aabb
- Some more questions on string permutation and combination
- Asked oops concepts and compare java with c++
- Asked a few questions on Unix scripting
- Round 5
- Tell about yourself
- given a list of size n find should have numbers from 1-n, but a number occurs twice and other number doesn’t occur. Find both the numbers in linear time.
- A leaf grows twice the size it is yesterday.how many days would it cover half the pond, given the number of days in which it covers the whole pond.
- A few more questions in do not remember
- I was comfortable in Java so asked concepts of java here and there and other oops concepts.
- Round 6 HR (Finally 7:00 pm)
- was given a task to make a placement portal what technologies would you use I answered it using html, css and php etc
- Asked to estimate the number of people playing football in india on guess
and was asked to do the same on estimate - horses and races puzzle, I told I had already seen the problem so the hr twisted the problem here and there.
- about yourself, strength and weaknesses
- Some personal questions
- About the role and few details of the company.
All in all the interviewers were quite knowledgeable and kept on hinting a bit as and when i used to get stuck and asked for any questions I had about(Interview, company etc). Overall it was exhausting but good experience.
All Practice Problems for D-E-Shaw !
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