Goldman Sachs Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I was initially contacted through LinkedIn by one of their internal "talent scouts". They sent me an copy of the job description and asked if I would be interested in learning more. I said yes, and we had a brief phone conversation where they asked my current salary range, years of experience, and a few other minor details I can't quite recall. After that first contact, I was transitioned over to an internal HR person who coordinated the rest of my interviews.

Round 1:

For the first round of interviews I travelled to their SLC office located by the UoU. I met with 5 different individuals over the course of 3 hours.

Interview 1: Fairly general interview, with questions like "Why are you interested in this position?" and "What are your strengths/weaknesses?" 1st interviewer also asked basic technical questions which seemed more to be a gauge of troubleshooting approaches and use of logic.

Interview 2: Phone interview, technical. Asked specific questions about technology's I had listed on my resume. If you list it, be prepared for trivia style questions. For example, if you list BGP -- be prepared to know the order of PA's that BGP will use to evaluate routes. Or how you would configure a prefix list for a range of subnets. Also things like timers, show commands.

Interview 3: Technical interview. This particular person was very rushed, and was impatient with me when I didn't immediately come to the same conclusions he would've on some subjective questions.

Interview 4: HR interview. Mostly asked about what kind of role I saw myself in, what my general interests were in regards to day to day work, and some talk about how different teams interacted.

Interview 5: Manager interview. Similar to the HR interview in that it was very high level -- asked about previous experience, what I saw in GS that interested in me, where I saw myself in 3-5 years, etc.

Round 2:

I was invited to participate in a second round of interviews, all via phone. These were strictly technical interviews, and followed similar patterns to my Interview #2 during round 1. They asked a lot of questions about what I've worked with in the past, and to "explain technology xyz..." For example, I have experience with load-balancing, so they asked "Explain to me how load-balancing works." Stuff like that. These interviews were much than round 1 and the people seemed genuinely friendly and easy to get along with.

Round 3:

I'm not sure if this was a round 3 interview or a late round 2, but I had a single phone interview with someone from NY. They were a senior technologist, but I"m not exactly sure where they were at in the hierarchy. This interview was also very similar to Round 2, in that it was technical, had some trivia, and also asked a lot of "Tell me how you would do xyz..."

As I mentioned before, if it's on your resume they will ask you about it. It also seemed like most of the individuals where just skimming down through my resume and asking me whatever popped into their minds about the specific resume item. Some of the questions were:
-- Why would you use multi-area OSPF over single area?
-- How would you troubleshoot a routing problem between two routers in different regions?
-- Tell me how you would configure HSRP to failover based on the status of an upstream router.
-- Tell me about load-balancing.
-- Tell me how stateful firewalls work

Reason for Declining – I read a lot of reviews about how the environment at GS was very demanding, and as a result, work/life balance suffered. I asked interviewers at various times if that was true, and they all downplayed it, but I heard from multiple 1st or 2nd hand sources (current employees, or friends of current employees) who said that long hours were expected.

On top of that, it would've been a 2+ hr/day commute for me, and that was just too much time away from the family.

Technically, it would've been a fantastic opportunity.