Goldman Sachs Interview Experience by Harsimran Kaur | On Campus - Aug 2020

New update is available. Click here to update.

Goldman Sachs interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

Software Analyst

Goldman Sachs

4 rounds | 8 Coding problems

Harsimran Kaur

Fresher | Aug 2020

Selected

Interview preparation journey

Journey

My journey started when I was in 2nd year of my college and I saw my friends practicing coding questions and some learning new coding languages and developing some individual projects. After seeing them I started to think that I should also start to learn more and practice coding questions. When I practicing coding questions on platform like Codechef and Hackerrank it made me realize that I need to think more to solve difficult problems and due to that I developed a habit of solving them.

Application story

I started preparing for the companies since 2nd year of my college and when I heard that Goldman Sachs is coming to our college I wanted to get selected in it. After that the interview process began which consisted of 4 round in total and 1st round was only coding interview, 2nd round was on video call and consisted of coding questions, 3rd round was a system design round and last round was HR round but they also asked technical questions.

Why selected/rejected for the role?

I was selected as I had been preparing to crack the interviews and practicing various coding questions since 2nd year of my college. After that when I heard that Goldman Sachs is coming to our college I specially looked for the questions which are asked in previous interview experiences for this company. Due to this I was able to answer everything.

Preparation

Duration: 3.5 months

Topics: I covered major data structure topics like Arrays, Stacks, Queues, Linked List, Trees, Graphs, backtracking, Dynamic Programming. After reading each topic, I tried to practice maximum questions on the concerned topic from Coding Ninjas, geeksforgeeks, Hackerrank and when stuck on a question, I preferred watching solution videos provided by Coding Ninjas.

Tip

Tip 1 : It is important to practice coding consistently because it is what enables you to solve interview-questions in the stipulated time. But before this, it is even important to have a clear understanding of all the data-structures, so that they can be easily implemented as and when required to solve a problem. It is also mandatory to have a clear understanding of the time and space complexities of algorithms because this is what you are judged upon in real interviews. Good intuition and a good approach to solve a problem is what really helps to crack the interview of such companies.

Tip 2 : They do not judge you upon the number of internships you have done or the number of projects you have made. A single ,good-quality project is sufficient, provided you have in-depth knowledge about it. What matters to them is how efficient learner you are, how good is your problem-solving skill and also how confident you are with your answers.

Tip 3 : Practise topic -wise questions, participate in lots of coding contests, watch lots of Youtube solutions even after you could solve a question, because you may find a different approach that is efficient than yours and watching video solutions is always a better option than just reading the solution , as it gives a clear and deeper understanding of the logics . Also pray hard along with your preparation.

Application process

Where: Campus

Eligibility: Above 7 CGPA

Resume tip

Tip 1 : Keep your resume short and clear. Mention your projects and internships with a brief description and year of completion. Mention coding languages are known to you, or other technical skills that you are good at. Do not mention anything that you are not good at. Highlight the topics that you are really good at.
Tip 2 : Be very honest and figure out only those things in your resume that you really know. Anything extra or unknown may have a negative impact upon your interview if asked by the interviewer.

Interview rounds

Round

Medium

Online Coding Interview

Duration120 minutes

Interview date2 Aug 2020

Problems2

This round was held in the evening at 6 o'clock on Hackerrank. It had coding questions: easy, medium, and hard level and MCQ's ( 1 minute for each MCQ). Negative marking was also there.

1. Word Search

You are given a two-dimensional grid having 'N' rows and 'M' columns, consisting of upper case characters. You are also given a word 'WORD'. You have to find the numbe...

Problem approach

I sat with a pen and paper and used the provided test-case , which helped me to make a tree like structure , which had to be explored until its depth.This is where I realized that Depth First Search could be used to solve the problem.

Try solving now

2. Climbing the leaderboard

Given a leaderboard of a game with the following ranking pattern:

The player with the highest score is ranked number 1 on the leaderboard.

Problem approach

This problem was of easy level and I could easily come up with a solution after identifying a relation between the rank and index of the element.

Try solving now

Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration40 minutes

Interview date4 Aug 2020

Problems2

This was an interview round ( technical round) that was held on video-call and a coding platform was also shared. The interviewer was very friendly with me . She was praising me on every solution that I provided.

1. Flatten The Multi-Level Linked List

You are given a multi-level linked list of 'N' nodes, each node has a next and child pointer which may or may not point to a separ...

Problem approach

Step 1: I first traversed the linked list and on find a child pointer, descended down the list but forgot to keep track of the next pointers of such nodes.
Step 2: It dawned upon me that I need a container to keep hold of all next-pointers, and Stack could be used for this.
Step 3: Then I gave a solution using stack and also flattening the linked-list in O(n) time and the interviewer was ...

Try solving now

2. Minimum Calls

There is a group of people and a special person in the group who does not know anybody, while other people in the group know him. Given a function: find(A, B) -> which returns True if A knows B and false if A does not know B. The task is to make minimum calls to this function to find out the special person.

Problem approach

Tip 1: Solution was easy: find(A, B)-> if it returns True, A is not the special person, since the special person does not know anybody. Also if find(A, B) -> return False, means B is not the special person, since he is known by everyone. This is how each time a person gets eliminated, and the person who remains is the special person.

Round

Medium

Video Call

Duration40 minutes

Interview date4 Aug 2020

Problems1

1. Design a hashset

Design a HashSet without using any built-in hash table libraries.

Implement the following public functions :

1) Constructor: It initializes the data members a...

Problem approach

I knew that HashSet uses O(1) time to search an element in the list. Also, the word ' Hash' in HashSet helped me to come up with the solution, to use hash table that can help solve the problem efficiently.

Try solving now

Round

Medium

HR Round

Duration40 minutes

Interview date4 Aug 2020

Problems3

It was online HR+Technical Round .

1. Print Nodes at distance K from a given node

You are given an arbitrary binary tree, a node of the tree, and an integer 'K'. You need to find all such nodes which have a distance K from the given node and return the list of these nodes.

...

Problem approach

Tip 1:We can solve this problem using breadth first search. Main thing to observe in this problem is that if we find two marked nodes which are at largest distance from each other considering all pairs of marked nodes then if a node is at a distance less than K from both of these two nodes then it will be at a distance less than K from all the marked nodes because these two nodes represents the...

Try solving now

2. What language do you code in ?

Problem approach

Tip 1: I had studied Python in-depth , so could answer all his questions .
Tip 2: There were some questions where I was stuck, but then was assisted by the interviewer in approaching to the solution.

3. Situational Problem

He gave me a situation where my colleague leaves the project in-between, and the deadline is approaching, how would I make up to meet the deadline in such a situation.

Problem approach

Tip 1: Taking assistance from my seniors, more dedication towards the project and approaching the manager for help were my answers .

Was this interview experience helpful?