Status: Final year student, B.Tech CSE, Tier 3 College
Application - Referral through LinkedIn
Position: Quality and Test Engineer (Member Engineering), DE Shaw
Location: Hyderabad, India
Date: February 27, 2022

Hi Leetcoders. I recently appeared for the Online Assessment for Quality and Test Engineering position at DE Shaw. The assessment duration was 95 minutes in whole. There was a negative marking for incorrect answers in MCQs. It consisted of 3 sections:

• Aptitude MCQs - medium-hard level. I am not so good at aptitude so I wasn't able to answer much questions.
• Technical MCQs - consisted of debugging and output questions most of which I was able to answer.
• 2 Coding Questions - each of the questions was time limited, i.e. 20 minutes for Q1 and around 35 minutes for Q2 (I am not so sure about the time limits).

Coding Question 1 - It was a just like the classic House Robber problem on Leetcode but just differed in language of course.

I was able to solve all the cases for Q1 since I had seen it on Leetcode before.

Coding Question 2 - This is was hard level problem which I am able to find on Leetcode and other platforms. So I'll just put the images of the question here -> img1 img2 img3

I was able to solve only half of the test cases for this question and my approach was almost brute force and the rest of the cases running TLE. I am putting my solution for this question below.

int ans=0;

void check(int n, int k, int size, int ksize, int tsize, char last, string s) {
    if (tsize == n) {
        ans++;
        return ;
    }

	if (size == 0 || ksize < k) 
	   check(n, k, size, ksize + 1, tsize + 1, 'L',  s + "L");
	
	check(n, k, 1, 0, tsize + 1, 'W', s + "W");
}

int chessStrategy(int n, int k) {
	check(n, k, 0, 0, 0, '-', "");
	return ans;
}

Any help on this question is much appreciated.

I was able to pass this round and received a phone call to schedule the interview.