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Technology Developer

D.E.Shaw
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3 rounds | 13 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Journey
In my second year, I took a competitive programming course from Coding Ninjas, which helped me delve deeper into data structures and algorithms (DSA). Afterward, I started practicing problems on CodeStudio.
Application story
I applied through a referral. I got to know about their recruiting through a friend. Then, I got an invitation for their Off-Campus test after a week of applying.
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I was rejected in the technical interview round because I could not provide an optimized solution. You should know every algorithm in depth.
Preparation
Duration: 3 months
Topics: Dynamic programming, Graph, DSA, OS, Networking, OOPS
Tip
Tip

Tip 1: Practice DSA questions daily.
Tip 2: Also focus on CS fundamentals (mainly OOPS, DBMS)

Application process
Where: Referral
Eligibility: 60% throughout.
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1: Add good Projects

Tip 2: Do not put false information on your resume.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Online Coding Interview
Duration120 minutes
Interview date18 Dec 2022
Coding problem8

• Total Duration of Test – 120 mins
• Total No. of Sections - 5
• Section 1 – One Coding Question - Easy difficulty (20 mins)
• Section 2 – One Coding Question - Medium difficulty (30 mins)
• Section 3 – One Coding Question - Medium difficulty (30 mins)
• Section 4 - Technical MCQs - 10 questions (20 mins)
• Section 5 - Aptitude MCQs - 10 questions (20 mins)
• Programming Sections (1, 2, and 3): This will have 3 coding questions with a time limit of 80 minutes. You must attempt the 1st coding question before moving to the second question and third. You cannot revisit the question/section once you proceed ahead
• MCQ Sections (4 and 5): This will have 10 technical and 10 aptitude questions, with a time limit of 20 minutes each. Each correct answer will carry 2 marks and the wrong answer will carry a negative 0.5
• Technical questions will cover Data structures & algorithms, Operating systems, Database systems, SQL, and Networks.
• Aptitude questions will cover Quantitative Aptitude, Problem-solving, and Logical & verbal Reasoning

1. Water

Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
AmazonAdobeMicrosoft

You are given an array 'ARR' of positive integers, each of which represents the number of liters of water in that particular bucket, we have to make the liters of water in every bucket equal.

We are allowed to do two types of operations any number of times:

1. We can altogether remove a bucket from the sequence

2. We can draw some water from a bucket

We have to tell the minimum number of liters removed to make all buckets have the same amount of water.

For example:

Given ‘N’ = 4 and ‘ARR’ = [1, 1, 2, 2].
The answer will be 2, i.e., if we chose that all buckets should have 1 unit of water, we will have to throw 1 unit of water from buckets 3 and 4. Hence 2.
Try solving now

2. Amazing Strings

Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
FlipkartUrban Company (UrbanClap)D.E.Shaw

Shrey has just arrived in the city. When he entered the city, he was given two strings. Now, after arriving at his college, his professor gave him an extra string. To check his intelligence, his professor told him to check if the third string given to him has all the characters of the first and second strings in any order. Help Shrey before his professor scolds him. He has to answer “YES” if all characters are present else “NO”.

Example: ‘HELLO’ and ‘SHREY’ are two initial strings, and his professor gave him ’HLOHEELSRY’. So, here all the characters are present, so he has to say “YES”.

Note: The strings contain only uppercase Latin characters.

Try solving now

3. OS Questions

Who needs a BIOS to function properly?

A) A mobile device
B) An operating system
C) Hardware devices
D) All of the above

4. OS Question

Which one of the following isn’t considered a real-time operating system?

A. PSOS
B. linuxRT
C. VRTX
D. Windows

5. DBMS

Which of the following is a top-down approach in which the entity's higher level can be divided into two lower sub-entities?

A. Aggregation
B. Generalization
C. Specialization
D. All of the above

6. DBMS

Which of the following refers to the number of attributes in a relation?

A) Degree
B) Row
C) Column
D) All of the above

7. Aptitude

A deck of 5 cards (each carrying a distinct number from 1 to 5) is shuffled thoroughly. Two cards are then removed one at a time from the deck. What is the probability that the two cards are selected with the number on the first card being one higher than the number on the second card?
A 1/5
B 4/25
C 1/4
D 2/5

8. Aptitude

The probability that a given positive integer lying between 1 and 100 (both inclusive) is NOT divisible by 2, 3 or 5 is ______ .
A 0.259
B 0.459
C 0.325
D .225

02
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration90 minutes
Interview date4 Feb 2023
Coding problem3

2 coding questions
CS fundamentals

1. Scramble String

Hard
15m average time
85% success
0/120
Asked in companies
Rubrik, Inc.PostmanCisco

You are given an integer ‘N’ and two strings ‘S’ and 'R' each having size = ‘N’. You can scramble the string ‘S’ to obtain string 'R' using the following operations:

1. If the length of the string is greater than 1:

  • Select any random index and split the string into two non-empty substrings. For e.g: if the string is ‘S’, then divide it into two non-empty substrings ‘A’ and ‘B’ such that ‘S’ = ‘A’ + ‘B’.
  • You can choose to swap the two substrings or keep them in the same order, i.e., after this operation string ‘S’ may become either ‘S’ = ‘A’ + ‘B’ or ‘S’ = ‘B’ + ‘A’.
  • Apply the first step recursively on each of the two strings ‘A’ and ‘B’.
  • 2. If the length of the string is equal to 1 then stop.

    Your task is to return true if 'R' is a scrambled string of ‘S’ else return false.

    Note:

    1. Both the strings are non-empty and are of the same length.
    
    2. You can apply the above operations any number of times on ‘S’.
    
    3. The operations can only be applied on the string ‘S’.
    
    4. ‘S’ and 'R' consist of lowercase letters only.
    
    Problem approach

    The basic idea is to divide s1(s2) into two substrings with length k and len-k and check if the two substrings s1[0..k-1] and s1[k, len-1] are the scrambles of s2[0..k-1] and s2[k,len-1] or s2[len-k, len-1] and s2[0..len-k-1] via recursion. The straightforward recursion will be very slow due to many repeated recursive function calls. To speed up the recursion, we can use an unordered_map isScramblePair to save intermediate results. The key used here is s1+s2, but other keys are also possible (e.g. using indices)

    Try solving now

    2. Shortest Common Supersequence

    Hard
    25m average time
    0/120
    Asked in companies
    Dream11Thought WorksSamsung

    Given two strings, ‘A’ and ‘B’. Return the shortest supersequence string ‘S’, containing both ‘A’ and ‘B’ as its subsequences. If there are multiple answers, return any of them.

    Note: A string 's' is a subsequence of string 't' if deleting some number of characters from 't' (possibly 0) results in the string 's'.

    For example:
    Suppose ‘A’ = “brute”, and ‘B’ = “groot”
    
    The shortest supersequence will be “bgruoote”. As shown below, it contains both ‘A’ and ‘B’ as subsequences.
    
    A   A A     A A
    b g r u o o t e
      B B   B B B  
    
    It can be proved that the length of supersequence for this input cannot be less than 8. So the output will be bgruoote.
    
    Try solving now

    3. OS Questions

    What is virtual function?(Learn)

    What is mutex, semaphore?(Learn)

    03
    Round
    Hard
    Video Call
    Duration60 minutes
    Interview date20 Feb 2023
    Coding problem2

    This wasn't an easy Round for me, and it went poorly. This round had two coding questions

    1. Beautiful Number

    Moderate
    25m average time
    70% success
    0/80
    Asked in companies
    GrowwPayPalD.E.Shaw

    Ninja loves beautiful numbers and also has two integers, ‘L’ and ‘R’, denoting an interval [L, R].

    Given the interval [L, R], Ninja wants you to find the number of Beautiful numbers in the interval.

    A Beautiful Number is a number that:

    Becomes 1 by repeatedly replacing the number with the sum of squares of its digits.

    If the number does not become 1, then it’s not a Beautiful Number.

    For example, given interval = [1, 3]

    We see that 1 is a Beautiful Number but 2,3 are not. Hence the answer is 1.

    Output the single integer, the sum of all Beautiful Numbers in the given range.

    Example:
    Input: ‘L’ = ‘1’ ,  'R' = ‘3’
    
    Output: 1
    
    As ‘1’ is the only Beautiful Number.
    
    3 is not Beautiful as, 
    3 -> 9
    9 -> 81
    81 -> 65
    65 -> 61 … and so on
    It can be shown that we cannot get 1. 
    
    Try solving now

    2. Interleaving Two Strings

    Moderate
    45m average time
    50% success
    0/80
    Asked in companies
    BarclaysAppleCisco

    You are given three strings 'A', 'B' and 'C'. Check whether 'C' is formed by an interleaving of 'A' and 'B'.

    'C' is said to be interleaving 'A' and 'B', if the length of 'C' is equal to the sum of the length of 'A' and length of 'B', all the characters of 'A' and 'B' are present in 'C' and the order of all these characters remains the same in all three strings.

    For Example:
    If A = “aab”, 'B' = “abc”, 'C' = “aaabbc”
    Here 'C' is an interleaving string of 'A' and 'B'. because 'C' contains all the characters of 'A' and 'B' and the order of all these characters is also the same in all three strings.
    

    interleaving

    If 'A' = “abc”, 'B' = “def”, 'C' = “abcdefg”
    Here 'C' is not an interleaving string of 'A' and 'B'. 'B'ecause neither A nor 'B' contains the character ‘g’.
    
    Try solving now

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