I had a very long lasting process with Goldman Sachs earlier this year.
I was contacted by a staffing agency for an opportunity with Goldman Sachs in their Core Engineering Department.
Below was the overall process:
Round 1 - Online Assessment (OA) - Mid-May 2021
I received a Hackerrank link which had two coding questions to be solved. Programming language was restricted to Java, Python, C++ and a couple more.
1 question was dp based and 2nd was a string based question. Both questions were of easy-medium difficulty.
Round 2 - CoderPad - Early June 2021
Interviewer called me on my cell at the scheduled time and a coderpad link was shared over email in advance. The interviewer then pasted two questions one after the other and expected me to explain my approach first and then code the same and run against sample test cases.
Question 1: Trapping rain water
Question 2: Subarray of min length with target sum - print length
This round lasted for around 30-40 minutes only, because the questions were fairly simple
A week later I was contacted by HR to schedule my interviews, which they call "Super Day".
I had got 4 back-to-back interviews scheduled on the same day for around 6 hours in total.
Super Day - Late June 2021
Round 1
Question 1:
Find 2 missing elements from the array of consecutive elements
-> if elements are not starting from 1
-> if elements are large in range 1 billion to 2 billion
Question 2:
Design Read and Write operations on an object which is very read intensive and should allow parallel reads. In case of any write operation, the object should be prevented from reading.
Basically they were looking for my understanding of mutex
Question 3:
Code for Meeting scheduler - minimum number of rooms required
Round 2
Question 1:
Implement stack which returns the element of max frequency
Working of Messaging Queues - needed me to explain with diagrams on a link that was shared
Design of distributed db transactions in Payment Service - they were looking for my understanding of two phase commit protocol
Round 3
Difference between Sybase ASE & Sybase IQ - I had mentioned that I have worked with these DBs
Advantages and uses of columnar databases
Code for Longest substring without repeating characters
Code for Valid Parentheses problem
Few more questions around my resume
Round 4 - Hiring Manager Round
Mostly questions around my resume
My exposure to different technologies
Some typical managerial questions
HM was very honest with me and clearly explained me their work culture and what to expect.
After the HM round I was not too convinced to work with GS as I was looking for hard-core technological work whereas the HM informed me not to expect that. He told me that the work will be more around business requirements than pure product development. HM had been working with GS for more than 13 years, had to trust his words :)
I hold around 5 years of experience working with another Investment Bank and they also had this typical kind of work. They do pay well, but I wanted to get into core product development.
After all these rounds, around early July I received a call from HR that they have received positive feedback and would like to take it forward. In the next week I received an email from them asking for documents.
In the meantime (since they had already taken around 2 months), I received another offer from a product company. After almost a month (I had already joined the other company), GS finally came back to me in early August with a verbal offer, which was a little more than what I had but I was expecting better.
For around a week, they tried to negotiate with me but were not moving beyond 38 LPA as base + relocation and performance based bonus. Since I was already making around 35 base in my home city, hence I respectfully declined the offer.
That's about it, hope it helps someone prepare well.