De Shaw

## Interview Experience ### Round 0: Written Round (Online Test) The online test consisted of three problems. They were timed as 25 minutes, 35 minutes, and 35 minutes for individual questions; time remaining from one problem did not transfer to the next. **Problem 1:** Binary search / two pointer problem. **Problem 2:** Topological sort and DFS. **Problem 3:** Finding a lexicographically minimum permutation. ### Round 1: Technical **Project/Internship:** Discussion about my current internship and one of my projects. **DSA Question 1 (Greedy):** Given a cost array, a profit array, and an initial budget, what is the maximum profit we can get from $k$ tasks? **DSA Question 2 (Strings):** Given a list of strings, return an array containing the number of substrings of each string which are not present as a substring in any other strings. **OOPS & OS:** What is polymorphism and its types? What are smart pointers? What is function overriding? Difference between Multiprocessing and Multi-threading and when they are used. ### Round 2: Technical **DSA Question 1:** Given $n$ points, find the maximum area of the rectangle that can be formed using these points. **DSA Question 2:** Given $n$ strings (where $n \approx 20$ and length of each string $\approx 10^5$), find a minimum length string such that all $n$ strings are substrings of the given string. I was asked to write the complete code for this. **System Design/DBMS:** Build a database schema for a cricket team consisting of all information for all balls bowled in a particular tournament. Questions were asked regarding normalization, scaling, etc. ### Round 3: Technical **OOPS:** Implementation of functions was provided, and I had to predict the output of different calls. This focused on function overloading and function overriding. **DSA Question 1:** Given $n$ people, each with specific empty slots, return the maximum range where all people are available. **DSA Question 2 (System Logic):** There were buy orders (price and quantity) and sell orders (price and quantity) for a stock. When will the buy order be placed and when will the sell order execute? Buyers and sellers can change the order by modifying the price or quantity. ### Overall Experience The interview experience was very positive. The interviewers were supportive and provided hints when required, especially during the database schema design in the second round. The major focus of the interviews was on DSA and OOPS.