About me:

• 2022 Grad
• Tier 3 college
• Computer Science
• Have Practiced DSA for more than 1 year.

I applied to Samsung through Referral
There were total 4 rounds
Each round was elimination round.

Round 1 - Samsung Coding Assessment

It was conducted on the cocubes platform. We were given 2 coding questions to solve in 1hr 30 min.

Q1) Find number of shortest paths from source to destination in the given graph (Solved using Dijkstra algorithm)

Q2) https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-tree/

Round 2 - Software Competency Advance Test

• This round was an online coding test of 3 hours. There is only 1 question. They call it as “Samsung SWC Advance Test” and believe me the test is pretty hard and very strictly proctored.
• The test happens using a virtual desktop connection, so the Internet doesn’t work. Plus you are monitored through video conferencing on mobile.
• Inorder to pass this test we have to pass all 50 test cases and we can submit the solution only 2/5/10 times based on question and can't use inbuild libraries.
• The question I got was based on Recursion + backtracking and had lot of edge cases. I was able to pass all the 50 test cases. I got for interview after three days.

Round 3 - Technical Interview (1Hr)

Interviewer asked me about my introduction , In my intro I told him about OU Notes and my current role and organization I’m working in and my past internship Experience. He asked follow up questions on my intro

• What tech stack you used to build OU Notes?
• What is flutter and dart?
• What is the biggest challenge you faced during your internship ?

then he told me that first he will check my computer fundamentals and then we will do Data structures questions

1. How good you are in Operating systems , rate yourself out of of 10 ?
2. What are different types of OS?
3. What is the difference between process and thread? what is context switching?
4. Did you ever used threads in any of your projects ?
5. What is Object Oriented Programming ?
6. Explain Inheritance ?
7. What are interfaces in java?
8. Explain OOPS concepts with one real world example
9. What is DBMS ?
10. What is the difference between inner and outer join ? etc

Then DSA Questions:

Q1) Modified version of single number question (https://leetcode.com/problems/single-number/)

Q2) Modified version of single number 2 question (https://leetcode.com/problems/single-number-ii/)

Both these questions were based on bit manipulation and can be solved using xor operator.

Q2 follow-up was to find the first set bit from right in the given number (which is one of the steps in solving Q2) without traversing through all the bit (which is the brute force approach).

Example : if number is 01110 , then we have to return 00010

He gave me hints to use the negation operator (~) . But was not able to come up with an Efficient approach.

He then moved to DSA Theory

3. What is Trie?
4. What is Hashing?
5. What is the difference between Hashing and Trie?
6. Give me one example each where hashing is better than trie and trie is better than hashing? (He grilled me in this question, Was not able to come up with efficient examples )
7. What are collision resolution techniques in hashing, explain them.

He then asked me another DS Question

Q8) How do you reverse an array of elements (https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-string/) Basic question, using two pointers.

Q9) Rotate array k times (https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-array/), Efficient approach to this question was O(n) time and O(1) space using reverse array logic, Which is the reason he asked me reverse array question first.

Q10) Check whether LinkedList has cycle or not (https://leetcode.com/problems/linked-list-cycle)

At last, he asked If I have any questions for him.

Round 4 - HR Round
It was a basic HR round and lasted about 25 mins.

1. Introduce yourself?
2. What are your strengths and weakness?
3. Why Samsung?
4. Willing to relocate?
5. What are your expectations from Samsung?
6. Do you have any questions? etc

Compensation:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/2821216/samsung-sde1-bangalore/1687705

Amazon interview experience:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2232898/Amazon-or-SDE1-or-India-or-April-2022-Reject