Among the firms coming on day 1 at IIT Madras in the Software profile I was most interested in the roles offered by
Rubrik
Cohesity
I was not Shortlisted for Cohesity which had a test comprising of 2 questions with some hidden testcases(hidden as in I could not see if my answer was correct or not). I could only give one round for Google where they asked me 3-4 easy DSA questions. I did not sit for further Google rounds as I had already received an offer from Quantbox at the time. Rubrik took 2 rounds for me. The first was a fairly challenging Graph Theory + DP problem. In the second round I was also asked an algorithmic question but it was a bit non-standard. I really liked both questions. I ended up getting an offer from Rubrik and accepted it.
Among the firms coming on day 1 at IIT Madras in the Quant profile I was most interested in the roles offered by
Quantbox
Graviton
Da Vinci
I was not Shortlisted for Graviton. Quantbox I was shortlisted for both quant and software. While in Da Vinci I was shortlisted for the trader role. Quantbox took a systems interview and probability/puzzles type interview for me. Da Vinci took a few Group Market Making rounds followed by a personal interview which involved speed-math and HR questions.
The DE Shaw internship interview had 4 stages. First, there was a test with 3 questions for selecting people for the interview stage. I was able to solve all 3 with time to spare. The interview consisted of 3 rounds with the first 2 being technical and the last one being an HR round for 10 minutes. Each technical round involved 1 or 2 DSA questions, 4-5 OOP principles questions, and a design question. This was followed by a 10 minute HR round.
Shaw selected 5 students from IITM. Following are some tips and pointers.
Practice Competitive Coding. If you don't have a lot of time, try solving a few questions from Leetcode.
Be very thorough with OOP concepts, Shaw in particular asks a lot of questions in that area as compared to other companies
During the interview keep calm and in case you are stuck ask the interviewer questions.
Try to get the problem clarified before starting coding/describing your solution.
Practise Design questions. These questions don't have you coding anything but involve some clever application of commonly used Data Structures.
The Google internship interview had 2 stages. First, there was an online test + Resume shortlist for selecting people for the interview stage. The interview consisted of 2 rounds each of roughly 1 hour each. Each involved 2 DSA questions which were to be coded on Google's own interview platform(Not Google Docs). If I were to rate the difficulty, in both rounds the first question was of BC level on Codeforces while the second one was CD level.
I was able to solve and code up all 4. Google ended up selecting 6 students from IITM out of the 11 who were shortlisted. However, the results were only announced on 31st August. Tips to ace the coding interview:-
Practice Competitive Coding and take part in Google's Coding Competitions, which can be found here.
If you do well in any contests or have a high rating on any platform add it to your resume. Google's shortlist seemed to have a high correlation with performance in Competitive Coding.
During the interview keep calm and in case you are stuck ask the interviewer questions.
Try to get the problem clarified before starting coding/describing your solution.
There was no HR round. Other than that Google was an excellent company, which had a really good selection procedure, for taking the best people in Algorithms, the questions which were asked in the interviews were also a blend of unique and standard questions, thereby making it a balanced interview process.