Samsung Research Institute Bangalore Interview Experience | On-Campus 2021

Hello there, In Oct'21 SRIB visited my college NIT Jalandhar for recruitment of SDE1 (6 Month Intern + FTE).There were 4 rounds in total.Round 1(Online Coding Round): Two ...

Hello there, In Oct'21 SRIB visited my college NIT Jalandhar for recruitment of SDE1 (6 Month Intern + FTE). There were 4 rounds in total. Round 1(Online Coding Round): Two coding questions were there which we needed to complete within 1 hour. The first question was based on the logic of Multiple Source BFS in Graph. There was some story was written I don't exactly remember the question. The second question was the variation of Aggressive Cows (from SPOJ) . 200+ students appeared for this round and 38 were shortlisted. Round 2(Technical Interview 1): The technical interviews were held on Google Meet. The interviewer joined the meet and greeted me very politely, there was some small talk, and then he introduced himself (he was SDE-3 at Samsung R&D) and asked me to introduce myself. I introduced myself. Then he asked the story behind my username (Heisenberg) of coding profiles. I told him the story behind that, he responded in a very positive way. Then he started asking me which Data Structures and Algorithms do you know about - I said Array, stacks, queues, Linked List, Graph, Tree, Heaps, Dynamic Programming, Greedy , etc. He asked me about heap first and how heapify works and how will I implement the heap. I answered him the whole process and he was happy with my answer. Then he asked me which Graph Algorithms I know, I answered, DFS , BFS, Dijkstra , Bellman-Ford , Tarjan's Algorithm , Floyd Warshall , Kosaraju , etc. He instantly jumped to the next question: He said, "In mobile phones, you should've used pattern locks, so according to you how many different combinations do you think you can make while using 4 dots out of 9?". I answered with the logic of combination and applied the formula nCr. He asked, " Do you think that the answer you are giving is the total number of patterns you can make using 4 dots out of 9 dots?" I answered, No, these are just the number of combinations but the number of permutations using 4 dots out of 9 will be much larger than the answer I am giving. He asked me to give the number of permutations in the possible combinations?. I answered after calculating. He said, "Do you think this number is exactly the number of total patterns using 4 dots out of 9 ?" I answered yes first and then changed my answer to no because there can be invalid patterns as well. He said, "Give me 1 invalid pattern you can think of?" I answered that imagine dots as numbers from 1 to 9, then using four dots out of 9, the invalid pattern can be 3->1->2->6. He was happy and said you have good observational skills. Then he said can you write a program to generate all the patterns using 4 dots out of 9. I told him the approach using matrix and backtracking. He said, how will you rectify the invalid patterns, I answered that, if some dot is in the same row/column/diagonal and have a distance greater than 1 from connecting dot, it will be invalid. He said good, but don't you think while writing in a program it will be difficult. I replied, Yes and gave another approach using graphs. He was happy and then he said to write the pseudocode. I explained the pseudocode and he was impressed. He asked me that, can I guess what will be his next question? I said I think it will be something easy as he was grilling a lot. He laughed sarcastically and then jumped to the next question. He said you have two cans one of 7litres and another of 5litres. Can you give me 10litres? I answered it easily. Then he said now give me 11litres? It took some time and then I answered. (Standard puzzle right?) He said now can you write a program that can give me the minimum number of steps to give me some volume (value given by the user) and you can assume the cans of 7litres & 5litres. I was stuck for some time and asked many cross-questions to better understand what he wanted. Then given an approach using recursion, he was not completely satisfied so he gave a hint to me, and then I answered him it the way he wanted. We already crossed the time limit, so he said do I had any questions for him? I asked about the opportunities within Samsung and working culture. I got the call after just 5 mins of the interview completed, for second round shortlisting. Round 3(Technical Interview 2): The interviewer was late for around 10 mins. The interviewer introduced himself (he was SDE-2) and asked me to introduce myself. After the introduction, he asked me about my favorite CS subject - I answered, "Operating Systems, DBMS, HLD, and LLD. He asked me about Thrashing, then he said how does the CPU knows in paging that it needs to execute which page, I explained the whole process of Logical Address and Physical Address and how MMU manages it. He asked me a simple question of Linked list. He gave me input like: 25->30->20->12->35. And said convert this to 25->35->30->12->20 . I gave him two approaches, and then he said to write the code. I wrote the code and ran it, he tested it on several Test cases and it was working fine. He asked me a standard question of tree All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree(https://leetcode.com/problems/all-nodes-distance-k-in-binary-tree/). I gave him the approach and wrote the code as well. He was happy. He said do I had any questions for him. The interview was over and I was confident about the positive results but I did not get the HR call for further rounds on next day and I thought that the chance is gone. But after two days I got the call for further round and I was soo thankful. Round 4(HR Interview): This round was telephonic for me. It lasted for 15 minutes. He asked my brief intro and said tell me something which is not in your resume, I answered "Travelling, video editing, and cooking." He asked me my dream destination, I answered Bali. He asked, why? I answered that I think that place is full of peace and I can be very close to nature there. He asked me why do you want to join Samsung? I answered him that as Samsung works in a lot of different domains, I think I will get a lot of opportunities within Samsung, also it is a very well-known brand in world, so I think Samsung will treat its employees in that way. I asked him what is his personal experience about working at Samsung. He answered honestly and the interview was completed on a very positive note. After 3-4 hours we got the results and there was my name as well, and I was in tears (first job ritual). Tip: Samsung loves graphs, so be well versed with that, and learn everything with proper logic they will grill a lot, so mugging up will not help. All the best!!!