I received a call from HR at GS asking for a suitable time for a face-to-face interview. Since I had prior experience, there was no telephonic interview. The interview was scheduled for Monday at 2 PM, and I arrived at their office by then. I waited for almost 1.5 hours at the reception for the interviewer to receive me. He stated that he was not aware of my interview.

We then entered the office and went to a conference room. We waited there for another 10 minutes while the printer was being fixed to print my resume.

FIRST ROUND

This was a one-on-one interview that lasted for approximately 40 minutes.

The interview focused heavily on core Java questions. The interviewer asked me about threads, marker interfaces, serialization, synchronization, Timers, and deadlocks, all at a basic level. He also inquired about the merge concept in merge sort.

He then asked me about quicksort and randomization within it, without seemingly understanding the basic concepts of randomization himself. I explained that I would pick a random element as a pivot, swap it with the last element in the array, and then perform partitioning based on it. He countered that this might disturb the randomness. I clarified that since the input data distribution is unknown, we are not affecting the randomness, and therefore, we can only determine the expected complexity of randomized algorithms. He did not grasp my explanation at all, and the discussion concluded unsatisfactorily.

He finished his questions, and I answered all of them. I was then kept waiting for 20 minutes before the second round began.

SECOND ROUND

This was a two-person interview that lasted for about 30 minutes, as the interviewers had a meeting scheduled after concluding my interview formalities.

They asked me basic questions on collections and a few simple puzzles. They also posed very basic questions on threads and synchronization concepts.

One of the interviewers escorted me to the reception and mentioned that HR would contact me within a day or two. I was confident that if the process was fair, I would be invited for an HR round. However, I was concerned about the interviewers' apparent haste and the lack of seriousness in finishing the interviews.

The next day, I received an email from HR stating that I was not selected.

OVERALL EXPERIENCE

Being called for an interview, then made to wait for 1.5 hours due to the interviewer not being informed, and subsequently rushing through the interview process made me realize that unprofessionalism can be expected even from supposedly reputable companies like GS!