GOLDMAN SACHS - When I received a call from HR, I was overwhelmed, but...

The interview was surprisingly simple, especially considering I had prepared from a FAANG perspective. The day before the onsite interview, I reviewed some insights from Glassdoor and Blind. The questions asked in India and Singapore seemed more sensible than those posed during the onsite interview in San Francisco. However, I assumed their pattern might have changed and proceeded with a positive outlook.

Phone Interview: The phone interview consisted of two LeetCode/Glassdoor questions: 'Trapping Rain Water' and 'String Compression.' After clearing the phone interview, I was invited for an onsite interview.

Onsite Interviews: The onsite interviews comprised four rounds at the Marcus office in San Francisco, which is a WeWork shared space.

Round 1: Two interviewers, one joining via video conference and another in person. The interviewer in person seemed unprepared, scanning my resume on the spot and informing me, "I am looking at your resume now – give me two minutes." They began by asking me to explain the agile process, followed by performance testing. I felt they were not particularly interested in interviewing me. Later, they asked me to explain the SDLC process and concluded by saying, "You do pretty much what we work on here!"

Round 2: Manager interview. The manager was very interested in my current work and the technologies I had been using, as they were looking to adapt them into their current scope of work. I enjoyed the conversation and delved deep into certain technologies.

Round 3: Technical round with an engineer from New York. I was asked to work on CoderPad with the interviewer via call, using an iPad whose screen was continuously flickering. Juggling to write code on an iPad, especially one that was flickering, was a challenging experience. I made several typing mistakes and found it difficult to correct them due to the flickering screen. The problem was to calculate the average of grades and return the highest grade. The Glassdoor question was: { "charles": 99, "bob": 86, "charles": 97 }. The expected return was "bob: 86".

Suggestion 1: Just type this question into Google; you will find the question and answer from another candidate on Glassdoor. Suggestion 2: If they provide you with an iPad for your coding interview, please stop them and ask if you can use your own laptop.

Round 4: System Design. The two engineers seemed to expect a design based on their own course of work rather than understanding my explanation. The problem statement involved two servers transacting using the UDP protocol and handling dropped packets. My simple answer was to use TCP. I suggested various alternatives, but they then asked me to resolve a concurrency issue. Before I could proceed, our time was up.

At the end of the interviews, I called HR and informed them that I did not wish to proceed with Goldman Sachs, as I was not satisfied with the interview level.

Reviews:

Don't overthink preparing for Goldman Sachs; you can likely clear the interview with minimal knowledge.

If you are expecting more amazing or challenge-oriented work, I would not recommend wasting your time interviewing here. When the manager was explaining their pipeline of tasks for the future, I had already decided against it.

All the best!

Phone: Trapping Rain Water, String Compression

Onsite: Round 1: Agile Methodology, SDLC process Round 2: Manager Round 3: Coding Round 4: Design