DE Shaw Interview Questions – Set 3

Interview Process with D E Shaw India is very lengthy and it involved nearly 5 rounds for me. Even though I heard so many reviews there would be huge work pressure and that the employees will have to work for nearly 12 hrs daily, I decided to give it a go to see how the process will be.

Round 1 –

Asked basic core java questions, SQL Index & Query related, covered a few questions on Servlets like persisting count object in Multi-threaded servlet environment and ended the interview round asking few puzzles. After telephonic, they scheduled a face-to-face interview for me and I was surprised when HR told me that they would conduct 3-4 rounds that day itself after reaching their office.

Round 2 – F2F

Started the round asking How to find the closest square of a given number and print the root of the square. The interviewer was very cool and gave me a hint to use binary search to get the solution when I showed him a trivial solution which has more time complexity than binary search. Asked one more simple question like finding the row with max no of 1′s in a sorted MxN matrix. Finished the round asking questions on Thread joins, multi-threading in java, Serialization of static vars etc.

Round 3 – F2F

This round was more concentrated on the things which I am currently working on at my current company – asked questions on architecture used in our application, Restful services & Session Management/ User Authentication across multiple servers operating simultaneously.

Round 4 – F2F

This time a guy and a girl came together for interviewing me and I was thinking like how hard the round will get now! They started off asking questions on XML & JSON Serialization differences, Data Structure differences, Circular references in XML serialization etc. Then asked me to write an algo to find the Nodes at a distance D from a Node with value ‘n’ in a binary tree. Since they have already read the solution for that, when I came up with different value checks in my sol’n they got confused and suggested changes to make it look like the solution they have received. Later, asked me to write class code for different Vehicle types and calculate their Metric value based on no of wheels property. At the end they asked me to write a method in which the User will be able to provide the method implementing logic for calculating metric value at run time. I did not understand the question and its still confusing for me. I told them that I would use wrapper method over the 3rd Party method provided by user for which they did not agree saying that would be static solution.

Round 5 – F2F

This round mainly focused on design patterns and asked me which is my fav pattern and why, concentrated a bit on serialization, garbage collection etc. Later asked to design a Ladder data structure and an algorithm related one on sorting the courier packages for a Robot to place them in a holder based on their destination and sort the packages by size in a pyramid shape so that small boxes would be on top always. They will ask you to write code for each solution in all rounds and even if you miss a syntax or return type, they will spot it right away.It would be really hard when you lose touch writing code manually with using Eclipse.

One Thought on “DE Shaw Interview Questions – Set 3

  1. Nisha on July 13, 2015 at 8:43 pm said:

    Could you please let me know for which profile you interviewed at DE shaw?? Is it through referral??

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