Lehman Brothers FTA Technical and HR interview Experience

Technical (for about 50 min)

It started with some puzzles,

1. Given 7 gold bars connected with ropes, you have to give a labour his payment for the day with one gold bar. You have to minimize the number of cuts (i.e. of ropes) so that you pay the labour for 7 days. He can never be under or over paid. <2>
2. The next was the 4 persons crossing the bridge who take different times (10s, 5s, 2s, 1s)... they have to carry a lamp ..... only 2 persons can travel the bridge at a time. Optimize the total time required. You may wanna propose a general strategy to deal with n people all with different times.

Project related questions.

Internship related questions.

Computer Organization and Architecture related - how many functions did you implement in your 4 - bit CPU, name them. How many functions can be implemented, why the need for 0000 one. What is max bit size CPU available.

Cryptography - They asked about elliptic cryptography.

Sorting Related

Given two list of very large size (say 10 MB), how would you check that each element of one is present in the other. Start from the Brute force method, state its complexity. From here on start optimizing this check one step at a time, on the basis of Space and Time.

Knowledge of Sorting methods, their complexities, when and where will they be used.

Link List related

Reverse a single link list. Use minimum pointers. Do iteratively and also recursively, from front end and/or back end.

Given a pointer to an intermediate node of a link list whose head pointer we do not have, how would you delete it.

There were few other questions on linked list

Binary Tree Related

Questions related to tree heights , whats is the maximum and minimum height
of the tree. Write Mathematical expression for the height.

Write code to find the average height of the of the tree. Write code for finding maximum and minimum height of the tree.

Asked about other Search algorithms, other than binary Search.

There were some questions in between from other fields as well which I could no remember now. All these questions pretty much sums up the technical part.

Now the HR part .... (huff puff) (for about 20-25 min)

1. Tell something about yourself.
2. Tell about your family.
3. Why not microsoft or google.
4. Why Mumbai when you can work in Bangalore where your brother is.
5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years.
6. Why not research.
7. What if you get a call from IIM A, B, C.
8. What if you get a call from IIM L, K, I.
9. Any Idea about firms like us (competitors).
10. What do you expect from the company.
11. How our Job profile different from others.
12. Hows our company different from others.
    

There were other questions as well( i will post them when i remember ;-) ].

xoxo
aL