CDC Chronicles: Preparing and Conquering Campus Interviews

Glean work assistant

Hello Everyone,

I am Aryan Singh, a fourth-year dual degree student from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. Major courses that helped me throughout the internship drive were DSA, OS, Networks, OOPs, and DBMS. My CGPA that was recorded for the CDC internship drive was 9.78. The projects that I mentioned on my C.V. were :-

1. A web-app for NGO management with a focus on SRS, Testing, and Design Planning. This was my software engineering course project.
2. An online bidding marketplace with an efficient backend database. ER Diagram and DB Schema were used to design an efficient database. This was my DBMS course term project.
3. A React-based weather web app with a focus on the frontend. I built this by following a YouTube tutorial.
4. A minified version of Bash or cmd. The project was to build a wrapper around the Linux system calls. This was a long assignment from the Operating Systems Course.

A piece of advice from my side would be that if you include any project. Just go through it. Prepare for questions like :-

• Why did you use a particular framework or algorithm in your project?
• What were the pros and cons of using it?
• What were the alternatives that you had?

Early Preparation

My strategy was to always prioritize courses and labs during the semesters and, during the vacations, practice CP and explore web development as much as possible.

After completing my Algorithms I course, I started competitive coding in my second year. I started giving competitions on codeforces, codechef, and atcoder. I figured out that the most important part of problem solving is using the correct tools, and in the case of C++, that's the standard template library (STL). Once you master STL, you have already won half the battle.

Regular Preparation

During my second-year summer break, my B. Tech friends started preparing for their CDC internship drive. Inspired by them, I started giving Google CodeJam, Google Kickstart, and solving the Interview Bit Questions. I regularly took advice from them about their coding and interview experience.

Final Preparation

I decided to prepare for both the Quant and SDE roles.

For the SDE role, I started solving questions from LeetCode and Interview Bit. In the last 20 days, I started giving virtual contests on codeforces and atcoder. The reason I chose to give virtual contests was that it gave me more flexibility in time and allowed me to check the solutions instantly after the contest.

For Quant Role, I refreshed the basic probability and statistics concepts. Solved puzzles from Heard on the Street, BrainStellar, 50 challenging questions on probability. I watched many riddles from the Ted-Ed YouTube channel.

During the last 15 days, I started revising the concepts of OS, OOPs, DBMS, and networks. I watched mock interviews on YouTube to get a feel of coding interviews. I revised the projects that I had mentioned on my CV.

Coding Rounds :

I cleared the coding round shortlisting for :-

• D.E. Shaw — They had three questions of medium difficulty. Time was allotted for each question separately. The run test feature checked the outputs over sample test cases only, so I had to check the correctness of the code myself.
• Microsoft — They had 2 standard questions. Again, you had to submit the first question to start the second question. Also, the run test checked the outputs over sample test cases only.
• QuantBox — They had 2 sections. Section 1 had 2 coding questions, including an approximate question and one algorithm question. Section 2 had oops MCQs.
• N.K. Securities — Mix of coding questions and quant MCQs.
• AlphaGrep — They had six questions with varying degrees of difficulty, from medium to hard.
• Salesforce — Three easy to medium questions.
• Sprinklr — 1 easy and 2 medium-hard questions.
• Jane Street — One round on hacker rank where you were given a description of a probabilistic game. Using your probability and expectation concepts, you had to make a strategy to maximize your winnings. In this round you had to write the answers in the given text box. Round 2 was a telephonic Interview which focused on hard probability and statistics based games.

To get on the shortlist for almost all companies, you had to solve all of the coding questions.

For Quadeye and Glean, candidates were selected for interviews based on their CV.

Interview Round

Jane Street

The final interview consisted of three rounds. Each of them was a market-making scenario where you had to make rational positive expectancy decisions to maximize your profits.

Glean

They had two rounds of interviews. In the first round, I was asked to design and implement a data structure. Based on the input from the interviewer, I made the implementation as efficient as possible. After each optimization, they asked me to analyze its space and time complexity. After explaining the best complexity design, I was asked to improve the performance by a constant factor.

Round 2 started with a medium-algorithm question. I gave them the optimized solution and explained the concept behind the workings of the algorithm. They asked me to write some test cases that would cover all the classes of test cases and asked me to dry run my code on them. The interviewer modified the question further and asked me to alter my solution to cater to the modification. With some help from the interviewer, I was finally able to design the optimal solution.

Quadeye (Systems Role)

They started with some OS and networking questions, and then asked me about the projects that I had listed on my CV. Then they asked 9–10 standard LeetCode questions.

Final Offer:

I consider myself fortunate that I have been given the opportunity to interview with these reputed firms, and I feel humbled to share that I have been offered a Software Engineering Intern role by Glean US.

I want to thank God, my family, friends, professors, and the IIT KGP CDC team for helping me throughout the CDC internship drive.