D.E.Shaw interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - Intern

D.E.Shaw

2 rounds | 4 Coding problems

Abhinav Aggarwal

Fresher | Aug 2020

Rejected

Interview preparation journey

Journey

I started my preparation in the early days of my college when I started practicing the leetcode and the code studio problems. In the end, I have done more than 300 questions on the leetcode platform.

Application story

I applied to this company throw the on-campus opportunity as this company always visit my college for hire.

Why selected/rejected for the role?

I was rejected because i was not able to explain all the concept with the correct accuracy.

Preparation

Duration: 4 months

Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, Object Oriented Programming, Time Complexity, Programming Language Implementation

Tip

Tip 1 : For an intern position in any big company, the most important thing is practicing data structures. Solve as many questions as you can on platforms like Coding Ninjas. First start picking up questions topic-wise and once you gain a decent confidence in every topic, start hitting harder questions randomly on various platforms. (Practice a minimum of 300 questions).
Tip 2 : If you are stuck at solving any question, instead of looking up for a code solution try to read discussions and see various approaches people are applying. This will surely make you prepared for the way in which the interviews are designed. Always keep a clock ticking while solving a problem as spending too much time while practicing surely makes you slow in the Online Tests and Interviews.
Tip 3 : Again specifically for internship preparation, focus mainly on the subjects that have been taught to you till now. As in many colleges Database Management, Operating Systems and Computer Networks are not taught till the 4th semester so you could easily focus on subjects in your curriculum. OOPS concepts are very important!

Application process

Where: Campus

Eligibility: 7 CGPA for CS, 8 CGPA for ECE and EE

Resume tip

Tip 1 : In On-Campus internship drives it is generally not required to have a very charming resume with a load of projects as the companies understand the candidate as a 4th semester student.
Tip 2 : But still if there is even a single decent project genuinely build by the student then it is more than sufficient.

Interview rounds

Round

Medium

Online Coding Interview

Duration90 minutes

Interview date2 Aug 2020

Coding problem3

It was conducted in the evening at around 7:00 p.m.
The hackerrank environment is clearly the best for conducting coding exams as it provides a decent interface for debugging and testing purposes.
There were 3 questions- 1 of easy level and 2 of medium level.

1. Pythagorean Triplets

Moderate

35m average time

70% success

0/80

Asked in companies

You are given an array of n integers (a1, a2,....,an), you need to find if the array contains a pythagorean triplet or not.

An array is sai...

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2. Ways to arrange balls

Hard

40m average time

50% success

0/120

Asked in companies

Given ‘a’ balls of type ‘A’, ‘b’ balls of type ‘B’ and ‘c’ balls of type ‘C’. You need to find the total number of ways to arrange the balls in a straight line such that adjacent balls are of diffe...

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3. LCS of three strings

Hard

45m average time

50% success

0/120

Asked in companies

Given three strings A, B and C, the task is to find the length of the longest common sub-sequence in all the three strings A, B and C.

Problem approach

1. It was a variation of a direct standard problem so I solved it on the go though it was of medium level.
2. The exact approach I applied is given in the link given in the problem statement.

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Round

Easy

Video Call

Duration60 minutes

Interview date5 Aug 2020

Coding problem1

The round was conducted on CodePair platform which provides a IDE along with a video call for interviews.
There were 2 interviewers and both were friendly.
I was first asked about the various subjects I have studied in my curriculum. Then I was asked about my favourite programming language to which I answered Python.
After this, they asked various confusing questions based on function calling, argument passing and pass by object reference concept in Python.
Then they asked about the implementation of dictionary in Python and wanted me to design one with the help of lists(arrays) and optimize its search, add and delete operations. (Could be done with hashing and probing).
Then they asked questions from subjects like Computer Architecture and Theory of Computation (Basic questions were asked so you should just remember the key topics in the subject).

1. Delete a Node from Linked List

Moderate

40m average time

67% success

0/80

Asked in companies

You have been given a linked list of integers. Your task is to write a function that deletes a node from a given position, 'POS'.

Note :

Problem approach

1. Firstly I asked the interviewer if there was any other node reference given in the linked list.
2. Then I asked if it was a singly or doubly linked list.
3. After that, I was stuck as I was attempting to delete the node memory from the linked list but on expressing my problem the interviewer guided me that I should just delete the data in that node.
4. Then I instantly replied with ...

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