Greetings from ASCII!
This is the first post under the series of Internship Interviews and we have with us Ravishankar Joshi to share his Interview experience with Google and D.E. Shaw.
Team ASCII: The Company at which you received your Internship/Placement.
Ravishankar: Google, D E Shaw
Team ASCII: How did you build your profile to suit the requirements of the company?
Ravishankar:
I maintained high CGPA, made a few self-projects and did some competitive coding to build my profile.
My CGPA was 9+ when I applied for the internships. I had a few self-projects (like a Chess game with AI, N-body simulation etc). I also had a few good ranks in codechef and Google Kickstart contests. Hence, projects, CGPA and contest ranks helped me get shortlisted for the interview. My PS 1 work at Hhomi Bhabha Centre of Science Education, Mumbai might also have helped, which was backend web development using Django.
The Google interviews took place around 22nd September 2018. I had prepared for internship interviews during summer vacation (during PS1). I used “Cracking the coding interview” book and interviewbit.com as the preparation resources. I received quite a bit of help from seniors like Lohit Marodia etc for interview preparation and mock interviews.
Team ASCII: How should one prepare for the upcoming Placements/Internships?
Ravishankar:
Without any doubt, Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) is the most important course to clear coding tests and the interviews. Also, some companies like D E Shaw tend to ask a lot of OOP and Principles of Programming Languages (like specific features of C, C++, Java, Python), DBMS and OOP questions. However, I found our courses insufficient for interview preparation (since companies ask questions from topics like dynamic programming that are not covered in our DSA course).
Hence, Cracking the coding interview book and interviewbit are good resources to prepare for DSA questions.
CGPA is given high importance for getting an internship at Google and a few such companies. Also, well-rounded computer science knowledge (DSA, OOP, DBMS, programming languages) is needed to get into such companies, instead of focus on just one area of interest (like say ML). (At fresher’s level, companies do not look for specialization.) However, they do look for projects and publications (if any). (Word of caution: If you have a paper published, they might ask questions from it exhaustively.)
For projects, it is not at all necessary to have it under a professor. You can very well do development projects on your own. Just that projects should be concrete and you should know them well. Projects help you distinguish yourself from the crowd.
Also, sometimes, luck plays an important role in such hiring processes, hence one should not get disheartened with rejections, and should keep applying to all companies (on and off campus). One of my friends had a stronger resume than mine, but he did not get shortlisted for Google interviews. One should also appear for Google Kickstart, Facebook hackercup and hackerrank coding tests of various companies like CodeNation, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, if one has not secured an internship.
I have also written an answer on Quora about this: 1
Team ASCII: What transpired during the multiple rounds of selections? (Please describe the kind of questions in your technical round and HR interviews, the difficulty levels, time limits and provide a general walk-through of the process)
Ravishankar:
The first round for Google was based on resume shortlisting. The second round was telephonic interviews with Google interviewers. After 2 telephonic interviews, I was given the internship offer.
The process consisted of 2 technical interviews (telephonic) of 45 minutes each, and no HR interview as such. The questions involved usual DSA questions. The questions did not involve any advanced topics and had only topics from our DSA syllabus. There were no questions from OOP or DBMS. I was asked 3 DSA questions in the first interview round, which I completed in around 35 minutes, due to which the interviewer was quite impressed. I was asked and solved 2 questions in 2nd round, which also I completed within the time limit (45 minutes). I think I solved all the questions most optimally possible, and hence cleared the interviews. At the end of both of the interviews, I was asked if I had any questions for the interviewer.
Google had shortlisted 8 people from our campus for interviews and finally selected 2 people for internship: me and Siddhinita Wandekar. After selection, we had to go through the usual process of document verification etc.
For D E Shaw, we had a coding test, from which they shortlisted 15 people. After that, we had to go through 2 technical interview rounds and 1 HR round. All 3 interview rounds were of 45 minutes each. Finally, 2 people: I and Varun Yeligar got an internship offer from D E Shaw.
In technical rounds, I was asked 1 question from probability, 5 questions from usual DSA topics, other 4-5 questions from Dynamic programming, several (5-6) questions from OOP/programming languages (C and Java features). There was 1 question from DBMS as well (on ‘join’ operation in SQL). I was able to solve all questions from DSA and OOP, but could solve 2-3 of the DP questions. Overall, I would say that DSA questions were a mix of old/known questions and new/difficult questions. (: They let students choose among C++, Java and Python as the language for OOP questions. And, they ask C questions to all the students.)
I feel that the strong factor leading to my selection was OOP/ programming language questions which separated me from the rest of the students. I was also asked a question based on design patterns (singleton), and when I solved it, the interviewer got quite impressed and made the question more complicated with multithreading etc, which I solved again. (The rest of the D E Shaw interview questions can be found on sites like Glassdoor.)
In D E Shaw interviews, I was asked to explain some of my projects. Hence, I explained my PS 1 project and 1-2 of my personal projects well. However, I was not asked any questions based on the projects. At the end of each of the interview, I was asked by the D E Shaw interviewers if I had any questions about the company.
The HR round was also important, and it was mostly a personality and leadership test. I was asked many common HR questions, which can be found online. Preparing for an HR round is a very important point that many students generally miss out.
Finally, I chose Google offer over the D E Shaw internship offer.
All the best for your preparation and we hope to see you on the ASCII page!
Best regards,
Team ASCII
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