I was contacted by a recruiter regarding the job opening. I received a call within a week for a phone interview. Four days after the phone interview, I was asked to come down to the Goldman office.

1st Phone Interview:

• Briefly introduce yourself and your present project.
• Define Java concepts: Abstraction, Inheritance, Polymorphism.
• Java Collections:
  • Explain how a HashMap works.
  • ArrayList vs. LinkedList.
• Agile methodology: Advantages and disadvantages.
• SQL:
  • Outer Join definition.
  • Difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes.
• Why do you want to leave your present job?

Followed by 6 technical 1:1 interviews:

They put the candidates under a lot of pressure by asking them to finish quickly, and they keep asking questions in between.

There were many project-related questions in each of the 6 interviews.

Java:

• List the collection framework interfaces and implementations. Define a property of each.
• Difference between Set and HashMap?
• How can you get a synchronized LinkedList? Does this make the program thread-safe?
• Compare ArrayList and LinkedList. And when do you use each of these?
• How would you create a HashMap data structure? How to handle collisions in a HashMap?
• What methods do you need to override when using an object as a key in a HashMap? Why do you need to override these?
• Concurrent HashMap.
• Different ways of creating threads in Java. Which one is the best?
• Difference between String and StringBuilder? What does immutable mean, and how does the String class become immutable?

Algo:

• Given pointers to two nodes in a binary tree, find their common parent. Give its time complexity.
• Write a sorting algorithm and explain its working with an example for 6 elements. Compare its performance with other sorting algorithms.

Others:

• What data structures are used in database indexing? How are they used for a date range query?
• Unit testing and why it is required. Why do a unit test on each module when doing a Maven/Ant build?
• Use of Subversion – merging, updates, etc.
• Performance monitoring tools.

HR / Behavioral:

• Why do you want to leave your present job?
• Why the financial industry? What will you do if, after starting, you feel the financial industry is not of your interest?
• Why Goldman?
• Difference between what Goldman does and what other companies like Bank of America or Chase do?
• Did you ever work in a team that did not cooperate? How did you handle this situation?
• Do you have experience working with global teams?
• Questions about the role and responsibilities at your present job.