Goldman Sachs Interview Experience | Set 25 (On-Campus for Internship)

Goldman Sachs visited our campus recently for the internship.

First Round was an online round hosted on HackerRank.
It comprised of 2 coding questions and 10 MCQ’s which had negative marking

The MCQ’s were related to C++, Algorithms and General Data Structures.
The coding questions were good.
1st was:
You are given a list of names.
Each name has two parts, first name and last name ( all small letters)
the order in which the names were given had to be noticed.
Next, you are given a permutation of the indices of the names.
You have to tell, whether it’s possible to sort the names, by choosing either the first name or the last name, for each name in the given permutation.
For eg:-
aman bitcoin -1
cat dining -2
electric fork -3

1 2 3
It’s clear if I select aman, cat, fork: it’s sorted according to the permutation.

2nd I don’t remember, but it was easy.

A total of 21 students were selected from around 190 students.

2nd round was technical cum HR face to face round.
The interviewer asked me:-
Tell me about yourself and your interests.
Next, he asked me no. of total diagonals in a regular n – gon.
I gave the answer as I remembered it. So he asked, did you already know it, I replied, yes.
Next, he asked total no. of intersections of diagonals in a regular n-gon.
I tried to solve it but wasn’t able to complete.

He asked about merge sort and why it is not preferred over quicksort.
He gave a puzzle.
You are given the arrival times of n buses and their halting times on a station.
You have to tell the minimum stations required such that no bus has to wait for another bus. ( relate it to OS )

3rd round was again technical cum HR round (F2F)
He asked me given an array, find whether there exists 3 elements-a,b,c in it such that a+b=c.
Then he asked me to optimize the algorithm.
Next asked me given an array of numbers, make the largest number possible by concatenating them.
E.G if the array is:
[1 , 100, 2]
then the largest number is: 21100
Then asked me about my projects ( on Pygame and OpenCV )
Finally, he asked about any questions for him.

4th and final round was purely technical and puzzle related (F2F)
He gave me a puzzle.
There are 100 lockers and 100 students.
The coach whistles 100 times and on every whistle, the number of whistles (1-100), and its multiples numbered lockers are toggled.
Finally, I had to tell no. of open lockers.
It was a simple problem, but I gave the wrong answer ( that too confidently :P)
Next, he asked why are potholes round and why are pizza boxes square in shape?

Next puzzle was, given 128 wrestlers, find the number of knockout matches required to determine the winner.
I solved it using a detailed approach, but he later told me a one-liner logical solution!

Finally, he asked about Dijkstra’s Algorithm and we were done.