Interview Preparation III

1. Reserve a string in place

https://www.codepuppet.com/2013/03/24/reversing-a-string-in-java-in-place/

2. Write a method that convert decimal to binary

3. What’s is Singleton

Write a method that convert decimal to binary

4. What are differences between Array and ArrayList in Java

5. If you are going to design a phone directory, what data structure will you use?

6. Calculates Fibonacci number Do it with recursion, and without recursion:

e.g: I have an array, [3, 5, 4 ]. Return 3rd, 5th, and 4th Fibonacci number and store in an array and return it.

What’s complexity of your algorithm?

7. Return size of last word in a sentence.

E.g.: String s = “Hello Wang”, return 4

String s2 = “Hello ”, return 5

String s3 = “”, return 0

8. Input is a number > 9. Write a program stops when sum of all digits is less than 10.

e.g. 38, 3+8 = 11; 1+1 = 2, stop

9. What are differences between String, StringBuilder and StringBuffer in Java

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2971315/string-stringbuffer-and-stringbuilder

what happens when you type a web site name and hit send

diff between app server and web server

white board reverse a linked list

singleton java code

diff between abstract class and interface

white board merge 2 unsorted arrays

you have a stream of integers randomly coming from some source find top n elements and return it as an array

some multi threading questions

some questions on maps, lists

synchronized block and methods.

write a sort algorithm, time complexity of adding/removing from stack (different implementations of stack)

Change string into integer

Given an array of integers(positive and negative), find the maximum sum of consecutive integers.

How does a HashMap find an entry? What is the runtime of that search?

anagrams

Difference between POST and PUT, can we cache the POST data and If no, why cant we do it.

http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2012/08/20/caching-http-post-requests-and-responses/

serializable classes in detail

Reverse a sentence.

Monty Hall paradox

write a binary search method

To sort the data in a stack without using loop.

Find the least common ancestor in an N-ary tree.

http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/lowest-common-ancestor-binary-tree-set-1/

why multiple inheritance is not supported in java ?

http://beginnersbook.com/2013/05/java-multiple-inheritance/

You will be meeting both Joseph Samuel and Shane Cronin. They are both senior managers at Blackrock – two really nice, well respected guys. We have hired before into Joe’s team, with the following be passed across following the final interview:

The format of the interview is similar to the first round. It's an hour long and there are two managers, Joe and another guy from the trading team in my case.

The first thing they said was that this isn't a technical round, they were happy with my technical stuff from the first round. The first 40 minutes we just went through my CV and the final 20 minutes is a chance for you to ask any questions you might have. So definitely be prepared with a few questions you didn't cover in the first round.

The questions I can remember went something like this.

You say on your CV that you have experience in building automated pipelines. What is your current build process and what was you level of involvement in designing it?

I notice you've done some AngularJS work, what did that involve?

Tell us about Spring State Machine. I looked it up and it's only on an early release. Who made the decision to use it? What did you use it for? And why did you not just build your own state machines?

The other things they asked were: Where do you see yourself in the future? What are your goals? Would you say you are still learning at your current job?

We also had brief chats on where the company is going, what sort of development processes are in place; the migration to Java 8; the migration to git from svn; the machines the developers get to work on; the working environment. One thing we talked about for a while was the in house messaging system they use, BlackRock Messaging System (BMS) and how they were using for development and in production.

The interviews tend to be pretty specific to the CV therefore go back through it, and know it inside out.

The following was also passed through from interviews in this space – from this, be specific about what you did, not the team, also research Blackrock and the area. You want to show them that you are really keen and up for the challenge:

The main theme was just talking through your cv and asking questions about why you did it this way or what would you have done differently.

The best bit of advice I can give is they want to hear what you specifically did and what your role was. I kept saying we did this but they didn't want to know about the team they wanted to know what I actually did.

The technical part was fairly easy, you get given an object and have to normalize it to put into a relational database.

I think they also liked the fact I'd researched what the core client processing (ccp) and transfer agent (ta) teams did on a high level.

For the second interview the main theme was, 'why do you want to work for blackrock and not any other bank?' and 'what do you prefer about blackrock to the start ups you are interviewing for'.

Sql, Spring, Competitive questions, research on it (company and the department, blacrock vs normal bank), the strength is docker, CI, Cassandra, Java 8, Monitoring System, AWS, Hadoop, Data Analysis, Concurrency

Competitive questions

Where do you see yourself in the future? What are your goals? Would you say you are still learning at your current job?

FIrstly I need to focus on the technical area and my goal is to become an expert in a certain area. In the meantime, I’d hope I’ll get chances to be exposed to some financial area.

Yeah I could still learn things a my current job, just not as fast as before.

Why are you leaving?

One of the reason is I just bought a flat in London and have to move.

Blackrock is the largest investment company in the world and you value techniques a lot, which is really great and impressive. Aladdin Platform is really famous and I really interested in contributing to it.

Blackrock vs normal banks

Blackrock is very different to normal banks as blackrock is the largest asset manger and cutting-edge technologies really play an important role. I think Blackrock is always a good choice.

2. technical foused

3. aladdin platform

4. largest in the area

Prepare questions:

what’s the department and system on going

You mentioned that it’s a new platform, can i ask which stage we are at atm? future plans of the system?

What’s the Java version used? Java 8/9, Cassandra?

Ask about Aladdin platform

So the platform is part of Aladdin? How does our team contribute to it? Could you explain more?

How do you monitor your applications generally?

Do you use Cloud? Hadoop? Big Data Analysis?

Visa if proper,