Goldman Sachs Associate Position
Summary
I interviewed for an Associate Java Developer position at Goldman Sachs in Bangalore. Despite successfully clearing multiple rigorous technical rounds, my experience concluded negatively after an unprofessional final interview and subsequent ghosting by the recruiter.
Full Experience
I recently interviewed for an Associate JAVA Developer position with the Controllers Hiring Team at Goldman Sachs in Bangalore, India. I have over 3 years of experience in product-based companies.
The process started with an Online Assessment (OA) where I successfully solved 2 easy Hackerrank questions and cleared this round.
Next was DSA Round I, where I was given 60 minutes to solve 2 medium-level questions. The first question involved finding a cycle and its length in an array based on element pointers. The second was a variation of the LeetCode "Minimum Path Sum" problem, requiring me to find the maximum path sum instead. I cleared this round.
Following this, I had DSA Round II, also with 2 medium questions in 60 minutes. The first was a design problem to implement a simplified Splitwise system, handling inputs like [['a', 'b', 200], ['b', 'c', 300]] and querying who owes whom. The second was a variation of the "Number of Islands" problem on LeetCode. I successfully cleared this round as well.
DSA Round III consisted of one medium and one hard question, along with some software engineering practices questions, again in 60 minutes. For the hard question, it was the LeetCode "First Missing Positive" problem, which I solved using cycle sort. The other was a variation of "Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock" where I needed to show trades and minimize the number of trades to reduce fees. I cleared this round.
Finally, I proceeded to DSA + Design Round IV, which included one medium DSA and one design question. This round was unfortunately the worst interview experience I have ever had. The interviewer was extremely non-friendly, throwing unnecessary insults and making snarky remarks about my degree when I struggled with some database-specific questions. He frequently switched off his video and eventually cut the call while I was still speaking. Despite giving my best, I honestly didn't deserve such treatment. The DSA question asked me to return the sum of lengths of all valid substrings, where a valid substring only contains characters from a given validChars list. I found this to be a pretty easy question and solved it in O(N) time and O(1) space. After this round, I was ghosted by the recruiter, and I'm still eagerly waiting for any feedback.
Interview Questions (6)
Maximum Path Sum in Grid (Variation)
Design Splitwise
Design a simplified Splitwise system. The system receives inputs like [['a', 'b', 200], ['b', 'c', 300]], where ['a', 'b', 200] means 'a paid b 200', implying 'b owes a 200'. The system should then be able to answer queries about who owes whom and the net amounts.
Number of Islands Variation
A variation of the Number of Islands problem.
First Missing Positive
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock with Transaction Fee (Variation)
A variation of the Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock problem. The goal is to show the trades made and perform the minimum number of trades to minimize the transaction fee.
Sum of Lengths of Valid Substrings
Given a string s (e.g., 'abcde') and a list of validChars (e.g., ['a', 'b', 'c']), return the sum of lengths of all valid substrings of s. A valid substring is defined as any substring of s that contains only characters present in validChars.