6 coding questions Goldman Sachs asks grads, interns & above
When faced with an engineering interview at Goldman Sachs, there are a near limitless number of coding questions you could be asked. It's best not to get too hung up on one question in particular, but studying them can give an indication of how difficult a potential problem can be. Luckily, three engineers have recently released the questions they were given: one was applying to be an intern, another was a new graduate, and the last, an experienced hire.
The Intern Questions
Perhaps due to their inherent lack of experience, the questions given to interns are more focused on the mathematics and theory, rather than real world application. The first involves finding data within a binary tree:
The second, which could be likened to spreadsheet manipulation, involves creating a system that can be interacted with:
The Graduate Questions
The graduate, who presumably has some experience under their belt and has proven their technical competencies, is instead faced with problems that more closely resemble practical applications. The first involves processing dates, something that can be very important from a compliance perspective:
The second appears more focused on the finance industry itself, dealing with cost calculations:
The Experienced Hire Questions
The experienced hire describes their problems rather than screenshotting them, but inidcations are that the technicality of these problems follow a bell curve, as these questions are less real-world focused than those of the new graduate.
The first is:
"Q1 : Given a list of resources, return the list of resources based on a certain priority condition
If any resource is occurring for a single time it is directly added to the output list, if the same resource occurs again
it should be updated with the newly occurred resource value.
The order of resources should be maintained"
It certainly has its applications, but could easily be seen in another engineering context. The next problem is even simpler:
"Given a string, return the compressed version of the string."
What does this indicate? Well, by the time an engineer has some experience, we can presume they know the industry. These kinds of questions just make sure they've not forgotten the basics, if anything.
Which set of questions do you find the easiest? Comment below your solutions or questions you've been asked in your banking engineer interview.
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