Samsung R&D Interview Experience | SDE – SET 1

Company Name: Samsung Research Institute Bangalore

Job Role: SDE1 (6M Intern + FTE)

Years of Experience Required: 0

Drive: On-campus

CTC: 20LPA

Preparation

Topics: Arrays, Linked List, Stacks and Queues, Heaps, Greedy, DP, Recursion, Graphs, Strings, Hashing, Trees, etc. Web Development, React, Solidity, Ethereum blockchain, Node.js, etc.

Duration: 6 months

Source of Preparation: Tech Dose, Striver’s SDE sheet, Aditya Verma, Code N code, Coding Ninjas

[BONUS]:

Samsung R&D Interview Questions

Round 1: Online Coding Test

Problem List:

Problem Statement 1: The first question was based on the logic of Multiple Source BFS in Graph. There was some story was written I don’t exactly remember the question.

Problem Statement 2: The second question was the variation of Aggressive Cows (from SPOJ).

Problem Statement 3:

Problem Statement: Given an m x n binary matrix mat, return the distance of the nearest 0 for each cell.

The distance between two adjacent cells is 1.

Similar to this not the same.

Examples:

Input Format: N = 5, array[] = {1,2,3,4,5}

Result: 2,1,4,3,5

Round 2: 1st Technical Round.

Topics asked: Puzzles/Graph/Recursion/Graphs

Problems: He asked me about heap first and how heapify works and how will I implement the heap. I answered him the whole process and he was happy with my answer.

Then he asked me which Graph Algorithms I know, I answered, DFS, BFS, Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, Tarjan’s Algorithm, Floyd Warshall, Kosaraju, etc.

He instantly jumped to the next question: 

He said, “In mobile phones, you should’ve used pattern locks, so according to you how many different combinations do you think you can make while using 4 dots out of 9?”.

I answered with the logic of combination and applied the formula nCr.

He asked, ” Do you think that the answer you are giving is the total number of patterns you can make using 4 dots out of 9 dots?” 

I answered, No, these are just the number of combinations but the number of permutations using 4 dots out of 9 will be much larger than the answer I am giving. He asked me to give the number of permutations in the possible combinations?.

I answered after calculating. He said, “Do you think this number is exactly the number of total patterns using 4 dots out of 9 ?”

I answered yes first and then changed my answer to no because there can be invalid patterns as well. He said, “Give me 1 invalid pattern you can think of?”

I answered that imagine dots as numbers from 1 to 9, then using four dots out of 9, the invalid pattern can be 3->1->2->6. He was happy and said you have good observational skills.

Then he said can you write a program to generate all the patterns using 4 dots out of 9. I told him the approach using matrix and backtracking. He said, how will you rectify the invalid patterns, I answered that, if some dot is in the same row/column/diagonal and have a distance greater than 1 from connecting dot, it will be invalid.  He said good, but don’t you think while writing in a program it will be difficult. I replied, Yes and gave another approach using graphs. He was happy and then he said to write the pseudocode. I explained the pseudocode and he was impressed.

He asked me that, can I guess what will be his next question?

I said I think it will be something easy as he was grilling a lot. He laughed sarcastically and then jumped to the next question.

He said you have two cans one of 7litres and another of 5litres. Can you give me 10litres?

I answered it easily. Then he said now give me 11litres? It took some time and then I answered.  (Standard puzzle right?)

He said now can you write a program that can give me the minimum number of steps to give me some volume (value given by the user) and you can assume the cans of 7litres & 5litres.

I answered it easily. Then he said now give me 11litres? It took some time and then I answered.  (Standard puzzle right?)

He said now can you write a program that can give me the minimum number of steps to give me some volume (value given by the user) and you can assume the cans of 7litres & 5litres.

I was stuck for some time and asked many cross-questions to better understand what he wanted. Then given an approach using recursion, he was not completely satisfied so he gave a hint to me, and then I answered him it the way he wanted.

We already crossed the time limit, so he said do I had any questions for him?

I asked about the opportunities within Samsung and working culture.

Round 3: 2nd Technical Round

The interviewer was late for around 10 mins.

The interviewer introduced himself (he was SDE-2) and asked me to introduce myself.

After the introduction, he asked me about my favorite CS subject – I answered, “Operating Systems, DBMS, HLD, and LLD.

He asked me about Thrashing, then he said how does the CPU know in paging that it needs to execute which page, I explained the whole process of Logical Address and Physical Address and how MMU manages it.

He asked me a simple question about the Linked list. He gave me input like: 25->30->20->12->35. 

And said convert this to 25->35->30->12->20.

I gave him two approaches, and then he said to write the code. I wrote the code and ran it, he tested it on several Test cases and it was working fine.

He asked me a standard question of tree All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree.

I gave him the approach and wrote the code as well. He was happy with my approach.

Round 4: HR/Managerial Round

This round was telephonic for me. It lasted for 15 minutes.

He asked my brief intro and said tell me something which is not in your resume, I answered “Travelling, video editing, and cooking.”

He asked me my dream destination, I answered Bali. He asks, why? I answered that I think that place is full of peace and I can be very close to nature there.

He asked me why do you want to join Samsung?

I answered him that as Samsung works in a lot of different domains, I think I will get a lot of opportunities within Samsung, also it is a very well-known brand in the world, so I think Samsung will treat its employees in that way.

I asked him what is his personal experience about working at Samsung. He answered honestly and the interview was completed on a very positive note.

Verdict: Selected

Message to Aspiring Students:

Graphs are super important and practice as much as you can it is possible no conventional questions are asked so be ready for that.