Coding – Be-Prepared

Pre-Placement Preparation

a. I was pretty clear on what companies I’d be targeting, hence figuring out the placement preparation goals was relatively easier.
b. My prep was majorly focussed on practising my coding skills, doing logic and
probability puzzles and learning enough about finance to be able to hold an intelligent discussion in an interview, alongside the usual practise of aptitude tests. I wasn’t really focussing on consulting firms, hence case prep was really not on my radar, which led to a rude shock during my AmEx interview.
c. Towards the beginning of November, I started working on HR questions. Having ready answers to the standard questions of HR interviews is a must and it helps if you have worked on framing answers to questions which are not the usual suspects, since, once in a while, some interviewer will ask you a slightly twisted question and having some extra ammunition comes in handy.
d. Try and find out if the companies you are targeting take GDs. If they do, form a group (with NOT your friends) and get together at least once every fortnight to practise your speaking skills. Even if your target companies don’t take GDs, form a group anyways as the practise would help you keep your thoughts collected and concise even in an environment pregnant with pressure, anticipation and urgency, something which you’ll be thankful for when one of your interview starts going south (and believe you me, it most definitely will.)

Placement Experience

a. I only had interview with P&G on Day1 and given their interviewing format that focuses solely on character traits and hence is essentially only HR interview and the fact that I wasn’t really interested in P&G, it offered me a good practise opportunity for my HR interviewing skills. Needless to say, I didn’t make the cut.
b. I interviewed with multiple companies in Day2 slot1 and didn’t even make it to the second round of interviews in any. I mention this only to impress upon you, the readers, that going into every interview with the same mindset and confidence as your very first interview is extremely important (more on this later).

American Express

AmEx interviews were scheduled in Day2 slot2. The aptitude test (no coding test) which they had conducted earlier comprised of 20 questions in 30 minutes. The questions were mostly easy, with some questions of moderate difficulty interspersed in them. Hence each incorrect answer could potentially knock you out of the shortlist. I think I got around 18 correct (just my guess, quite possibly could be wrong) and I was wait-listed for the interviews.
I wasn’t expecting to be called for interviews (rookie mistake – read up on the company even if you are waitlisted). So when I was called in for the AmEx interview, I read up on the company hoping that I’d have enough time before they called me in.
The first interview was resume based and a bit technical. After the usual ice breaker questions, the discussion turned towards the projects and internships I had listed on the resume. My third year internship was focussed on Natural Language Processing and I had mentioned the course project done in Machine Learning minor course on my resume too.
Since the profile being offered involved a fair bit of machine learning, the interviewer quickly latched on to it and the interview went from the details of my internship project to basic concepts of machine learning to some easy to moderate questions regarding machine learning techniques.
The interviewer also enquired about my proficiency with different programming languages and my experience as well as comfort while working with teams. Nothing too major league, just be sure to convince the interviewer that you are the best person ever for the job 😛
The first interview was limited to just these aspects of my resume as well as my technical proficiency and the interviewer ended the interview on a warm note, which was good indicator.
Pretty soon, I was called in for the second interview. The interviewer was, as I recall, Senior Vice President or on some similar post and was surprising chilled out person. Although the first interview was pretty relaxed and casual, the second one managed to be even more so. He started off the interview with the usual ‘tell me about yourself’, ‘why AmEx’ and pretty soon, he presented me with a case to solve.
Although it wasn’t really a core consult company level case and he made it ample clear that he just wanted to see my structure formulation and thought process, I had precious little experience approaching and solving cases. But thankfully, the chilled out interviewer had spiked up my confidence enough to start approaching the case with a logical approach. Although I myself wasn’t really happy with my proposed solution, the path I took must have been logical and coherent enough for them to offer me the position.

A common question across both interviews- why did you reject the PPO? If you are mentioning about your PPO, expect this question in almost 100% of the interviews. Prepare a good answer and tie it well with why the position for which you are interviewing offers better opportunities and doesn’t have the drawbacks you saw in the previous organization
(General rule – Don’t make it sound like the company itself was bad. As a matter of fact, as far as interviews are concerned, all my past supervisors, bosses, mentors etc had been very helpful, approachable)
Around 15-20 min after my second interview, I was informally told by the company officials that they’ll be extending me a job offer. Although I didn’t had too, I still interviewed for the companies with which I had interviews scheduled, just for the heck of it, to get the feel of interviewing without the stress or fear of getting rejected.

General Fundae

a. If you are decided on what field interests you, focus on that and don’t apply for every job profile just because everyone is. Not only will it weaken your preparation, it will either lead to unnecessary rejections or getting a more hectic schedule filled with interviews and tests you never wanted to give in the first place.
b. Don’t attend placement activities JUST for the sake of incentive points. I’m pretty sure most of you will disregard this advice (so did I ), but the initial JAF signing limit set by the PT cell is more than sufficient. You won’t miss out on any JAF because of the limit and sooner than you think, unlimited JAF signing will start.
That said, do attend events connected to your areas of interest. The alumni sometimes impart some insights that can be really helpful.
c. Try to attend the PPTs of your target companies. Usually it won’t have anything you couldn’t have gotten from their website, but they’ll give a clearer idea about the job profile being offered (and save you from some embarrassing questions during the interview) and well, sometimes, a random statistic from the PPT can come in handy during the HR interview.
d. Please try to get as clear idea about the job as possible. NEVER go in the interview without reading the job description and if possible, try to connect with the alumni working in that company. Not only does it reflect positively on you when you talk about this during the interview, some interviewers might themselves ask if you contacted the alumni already working there and coming up with a legitimate excuse then and there is harder than it seems (been in that tricky spot myself).
e. Do whatever it takes (well, not whatever it takes, but anything reasonable) to keep your spirits up during the process. Getting rejected again and again can be tough, but screwing up your future interviews because of them is just sad.
Remember, it is only your first job. So, de-stress whichever way you can, TRY and get enough sleep and don’t enter an interview room with the gloom and doom of your previous rejections obvious on your face. Believe me, it matters.
(This may sound a lot like self-help bullshit, but you’ll realize this too. Sadly though, it will be after you have been placed.)
f. This is mostly followed but just to reiterate- Be Empathetic. It is easy and frankly, expected to get lost in the joy of getting placed finally, but remember that some of your friends or batchmates or hostelmates might not be placed yet. So party as hard as you want on getting placed, because, well, you deserve it but maybe wait till December 15 before flooding everyone’s social media feeds with celebratory pics and congratulatory messages? Because if anyone understands the stress they are under, it is you.

Goldman Sachs, Risk Round 1, Risk Round 2, Coding Round 1, Coding Round 2

Profile at a Glance:

● Extensive experience in programming
● URA2 recipient
● 1 Internship:
3rd year summer: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
● 1 POR: Teaching assistant
● No work experience in the industry, no minor

Pre-Placement Preparation:

I was fairly certain that I only wanted to apply to software, coding and analytics profile. So most of my prep revolved around data structures and algorithms. Not having any work experience or a CS minor, I knew I already had a disadvantage. Also, unfortunately, because of my DDP, I wasn’t able to start my prep until the last week of October which is also when the company tests began.
I was suggested to start by reading the book ‘Cracking the coding interview’ but since I was short on time I decided to jump right in and start solving topic wise problems instead. I would spend an hour or so reading up on a topic and then another 4-5 hour solving problems. I mainly used interviewbit and leetcode for practice. I would suggest starting the prep lot earlier than I did as the company tests take up almost all of your time in November with as many as 6-7 tests everyday except for the end-sem week. Infact, in the last 3-4 days, I decided to give tests for at most 1 company each day as I had already made it into enough shortlists and thought it would be better to focus on interview prep instead.
I was shortlisted for 4 companies on day 1.
● Goldman Sachs
● JP Morgan Chase
● McKinsey Knowledge Centre
● NEC Corporation, Japan
The JPMC shortlist came in the last week and was pretty unexpected as it was a quant profile and I was only able to solve about 9 out of 30 quant problems in the test. They also had 2 coding problems in the test which I was able to solve which is probably why I was shortlisted. But this meant that I needed to prepare for quant interview questions in the last week with no prior practice. I spent an entire day in the last week solving problems from ‘Fifty challenging problems in probability’ by Frederick Mosteller and this other book called ‘Day 1’ by some IIT Madras students.
I did my HR prep only on the day before the interview. If you’re someone who gets nervous easily, I would suggest you start your HR prep earlier and do a few mock interviews with friends to gain confidence. In my opinion, HR questions are the most important questions in an interview. The HR questions are the ones that set you apart from everyone else.

Goldman Sachs

The test had 2 separate sections for coding and quant. The coding section had one coding problem and around 10 MCQs. The quant section had around 15 MCQs. The coding problem was fairly simple and logic based which didn’t require any knowledge of DSA. The quant section was also fairly easy with JEE level math problems. As these sections are for two separate profiles, you’re not expected to be good at both. I know students who only solved the quant section and were shortlisted for the interview.

Interview experience

GS was the only interview I had in slot 1. My first round was scheduled at 8:30 am. I slept for only 3 hours the night before. When I reached the venue the next morning, the interviews of some students had already started. There were 3 profiles for which candidates were being interviewed: coding, quant, and risk. I was called for the first round after about 15 mins.

Risk: Round 1

Round 1 only had 1 interviewer. She asked me to tell her about myself. I gave the answer I had prepared. After that, she asked me to wait in the room and she left. After a couple of minutes, another person entered the room and took the interviewer’s seat. I found it a bit odd but I guess the first interviewer realized that I wasn’t looking for the profile her team was offering.
The new interviewer then asked me 2 coding problems:
● Given a list of 99 distinct numbers between 1 to 100 in no particular order, find the missing number in the list.
● Implement a version queue data structure and a method to print all previous versions of the queue.
I answered both questions. He asked for a different solution for the second question than the one I gave. I gave a different solution after taking a hint. He then asked me why I wanted to work at Goldman Sachs and not some other financial firm? He also asked what kind of job profile I would be most interested in.

Risk: Round 2

For this round, there was a panel of 2 interviewers. One of them was the same interviewer from round 1. This round was relatively chill. They basically wanted to know why I wanted to work in finance when all my previous experience has been in research.
My BTP was on radius based nearest neighbor searching. The interviewer asked how I could use my radius based algorithm to implement a kNN algorithm. I gave a somewhat satisfactory answer. He then asked a simple coding question (how will you find the kth largest number from a stream of numbers) followed by a couple of simple follow-up questions on heaps.
The second interviewer then asked me how I would design a system such as an online shopping website to handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. I didn’t have any experience with distributed systems which I told them honestly but I explained using a load balancer and message queues.
At the end of the interview, I asked a few questions about the role and asked him if he could tell me about one of the most interesting projects he has worked on to get an idea of the kind of work his division handles. We had a nice discussion on this topic.

Coding: Round 1

This round was a lot more coding intensive. The interview started with a “tell me about yourself” and then went right into coding problems.
● Given an array, for each element find the first value to it’s right greater than that element.
● Write a function to print a permutation of an array of distinct elements such that each permutation is equally likely to occur.
● Find the minimum number of swaps required to sort an unsorted array.

I was able to solve the first 2 myself and the last one after a few hints. At the end of the interview, I asked some questions about the role, career path, and the work culture.

Coding: Round 2

This one was an absolute nightmare. After the usual ‘tell me about yourself’, he asked me a question from graph theory. As I was short on time during the prep, I had completely left out graphs. The question was,
● Given a connected graph, find the set of edges such that if one of the edges belonging to this set is removed, the graph becomes disconnected.
I somehow managed to come up with the correct algorithm after a lot of hints but there wasn’t enough time to write the code for it as all the other interviews were already over and everyone had left.
After the last interview, I was not at all expecting to get an offer. So I rushed back to the hostel, had some food while reading up and taking notes on the 3 companies in slot 2 and rushed back to H16 for slot 2.

I was completely burnt out at this point and had a terrible headache. I first went to give the NEC interview as I knew it would go well and I needed a good interview to recover from the last one. While I was waiting outside the interview room, a friend of mine who was also waiting for the interview saw the blog and told me that I made it into GS. I think I was happier because I didn’t have to give any more interviews than the fact that I got the job.

This also means that unfortunately, I don’t have any more interview experiences to share. Here are some of the interview tips:
● Be honest. This is, in my opinion, the most important thing to remember while answering any HR question. Don’t misrepresent yourself as someone you aren’t just to get a job. Instead, only focus on your strengths that align with the job requirements.
● Have a 3-4 line description ready for each project and internship you have on your resume. It’s easy to give a long description of a project but often difficult to summarize it in a few sentences. Use the STAR method to prepare these summaries (google ‘star method’)
● If you have interviews in slot 1, get something to eat for the morning the night before. You don’t want to walk around searching for food right before the interviews. Also, carry some food and a bottle with you.
● With GS, you don’t have to ace every interview. My roommate last year actually asked the interviewer if an interview with one team affects his chances with other teams after he completely messed up his quant interview and the interviewer said no. He later got an offer from one of the other teams.

Category: Coding

Harsh Srivastava