Goldman Sachs Analyst Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 90 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. 
Chocolate Distribution Problem
You are given an array/list CHOCOLATES of size 'N', where each element represents the number of chocolates in a packet. Your task is to distribute these chocolates among 'M'...read more
Ans. Recursion
The idea is that generate all the possible subsets of size ‘M’ and checks the minimum difference that can be possible from all subsets. 
 
1. This problem can be solved using recursion and the idea behind this is to generate all the possible minimum differences from the given array.
2. To store minimum difference we use a variable (say, ‘minVal’) and the initial value is ‘INFINITE’
3. For each element we will hav...read more
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Q2. 
Digits Decoding Problem
Ninja has a string of characters from 'A' to 'Z', encoded using their numeric values (A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26). The encoded string is given as a sequence of digits (SEQ). The task is t...read more
Ans. Recursion
• The idea is to use recursion to reduce the big problem into several small subproblems.
• We will call a helper function that returns us the number of valid de-codings.
  The helper function works in a way that initially, we will pass the sequence of length n to it. 
  Further, we will calculate the possible answer for the subsequence of length n-1 recursively. 
  Similarly, if it's valid, we will calculate the ...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This round was organized in day time from 2PM - 3PM
1 coding question and 1 code for debugging was given on the coderpad
Interviewer made it quite engaging with lot of discussions 
Time complexity and space complexity was also discussed in detail

Q1. 
Group Anagrams Together
Given an array/list of strings STR_LIST, group the anagrams together and return each group as a list of strings. Each group must contain strings that are anagrams of each other.
E...read more
Ans. Sorting based Approach
The idea behind this approach is that two or more than two strings are anagrams if and only if their sorted strings are equal. So we will use a HashMap, let’s say “anagramGroup”, where each key is a sorted string, and the key will be mapping to the list of indices from the given list of strings that form a group of anagrams. This means that if we sort the strings at those indices, we will get the ...read more
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Round duration - 50 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

This round began with detail introduction about me , college and my previous company. Then my projects were discussed in detail . Focus was on company projects, one machine learning based project done during college was also discussed in detail. 
There were 2 interviewers ,cross questioning one after other, but it was still a good conversation. I felt like it would be a rapid fire round due to 2 interviewers but it was really good , no pressure and discussion went quite well. After introduction, I was asked a trie based question and another one I approached using heap and interviewers were satisfied with answer of both solutions

Q1. 
Boyer Moore Algorithm for Pattern Searching
You are given a string text and a string pattern. Your task is to find all occurrences of pattern in the string text and return an array of indexes of all those...read more
Ans. Bad Character Heuristic
The idea is to find out which character mismatches in the text from the pattern that is the character of the text that doesn't match with the current character of the pattern and we call that character a bad character.
 
• One thing here needed to be observed is that unlike other algorithms for pattern searching boyer-Moore algorithm starts matching from the last character of the pattern.
• Therefo...read more
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There were 3 coding questions with medium difficulty level.

Good knowledge in logical reasoning and mathematics (especially probability) is required.

2 array based questions

1 array and 1 linked list based questions were asked

Q1. Logical reasoning and some general interview questions were asked.
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Round duration - 90 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Test was at 11am, we were gicing the test from home, aand were asked to switch on the web camera, and there was tab monitoring. The test had negative marking as well for MCQ questions +5, -2, so only answer those question which you are absolutely sure of.

Q1. 
Greatest Common Divisor Problem Statement
You are tasked with finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two given numbers 'X' and 'Y'. The GCD is defined as the largest integer that divides both of the...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Interview started at around 10:30am

Q1. 
Circular Tour Problem Statement
Consider a circular path with N petrol pumps. Each pump is numbered from 0 to N-1. Every petrol pump provides:
1. The amount of petrol available at the pump.
2. The distanc...read more
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Started at around 1pm, Interviewer was a senior person from hiring team

Q1. Can you describe the design of a parking lot system?
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Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Final round, with Senior person non-hiring team

2 DSA questions, leetcode medium level. Duration 1 hour

Q1. 1. Trapping rain water 2. Some array problem solved by HashMap
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Q2. 1. Java basics, collection framework 2. Find peak in an array
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Q3. 1. Edit Distance 2. Topological sort
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Q4. 1. N rook placing problem 2. Again Java basics
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Q5. 1. Give array elements randomly with no repeatition 2. Behavioral questions
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