Round 1: OA round: Hackerrank
Questions: Two easy to medium level questions were presented on the Hackerrank platform. The time limit was 2 hours, but the candidate was able to solve both questions in 30 minutes.
Candidate's Approach
No approach provided.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 2: First round: Coderpad
Questions:
- Variation of Pascal's Triangle II: Given row and column, return the corresponding number.
- Average sum: Given a list of pairs with name and score, return the average score of each student. This was noted as an easy question.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate was able to code the most optimized solution for both questions early, completing the interview in 30 minutes.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 3: Superday interviews - Second round: Data structures
Questions:
For the first two questions, the candidate started with a brute force approach and then coded the most optimized solution. For the third question, time constraints limited the candidate to discussing the approach.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate began with brute force solutions for the first two questions and transitioned to optimized solutions. For the third question, they discussed the approach due to time constraints.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Round 4: Third round: Software engineering practice
Questions: The candidate was asked to write clean code for the following aggregation problem: Given tuples (clientId, stockId, Quantity), return a map of (client, stockId, quantity). Example input:
"simran","hdfc",30 "xyz","idfc",10 "xyz","hdfc",20 "simran","tesla",10 "simran","hdfc",20 "xyz","tesla",10
Expected output:
[simran,hdfc,50] [simran,tesla,10] [xyz,idfc,10] [xyz,hdfc,20] [xyz,tesla,10]
Candidate's Approach
The candidate was able to code the solution for the aggregation problem and the interviewer was convinced by the coding question. However, they faced challenges in convincing the interviewers on a couple of cross-questions regarding their current project.
Interviewer's Feedback
No feedback provided.
Final Notes: After a few days, the candidate received a rejection notification via the portal. They attempted to seek feedback through email and phone calls but received no response. The candidate speculated that their inability to convince the interviewers on certain cross-questions about their current project may have contributed to the rejection. They expressed a desire for interviewers to be more flexible in understanding different projects.
The candidate inquired if there is a cooling period for reapplying to Goldman Sachs.