DE Shaw | SMTS[Reject]

Yoe : 3+

Current : SDE2 at indian ecom company

TC : 34

OA : 2 questions

1st Question was somewhat related to https://leetcode.com/problems/painting-the-walls/ . Solved this completely.

2nd Question was related to some combinatorics question(it was very hard for me) , did a simple brute force to pass 4-5 test cases.

Code Pair 1 :

Started with formal intro, discussed a bit about tech stack and stuff. Then started off with the DSA questions. Buy and Sell Stock - 2 & 3. Expectation was to explain and run the cases. Did well in this round.

Code Pair 2 :

After a very detailed intro , given a DSA question. I don't remember the exact question but it was related to knapsack dp. Then I was given a multithreading question , was supposed to give a sudo code and discuss things around multithreading, I have not worked with concurrency but did a coursework in my masters so I remember few things. This round went well.

Design :

Given a task to design browser history. Had a good 40 mins discussion then moved to a different problem altogether. It was related to handling trade informations, worked a bunch of things related to handling , relying , replay and types of message deliveries. This round went well.

LLD round :

Chat Application , with atleast 5 follow ups. Multithreading coding question. Did well in first half but was unable to run the multithreading one. Wrote a runnable code(with some syntax error), was able to discuss few aspects around it.

Verdict : Reject

I performed fairly well in all the interviews. I already had an offer in hand, which I transparently communicated to the DE Shaw recruiter. At the time, I was quite inclined towards that offer. So, when the recruiter asked about my compensation expectations from DE Shaw, I quoted a figure close to the highest band they've offered in recent times. In hindsight, I believe that might have been the turning point where things didn't align.