I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Mar 2013
Interview
I was contacted by Google recruiter and went directly with on-site interview because (I think) strong internal referral. I spent a week preparing the interview. On interview day, there were 5 rounds of technical interviews + lunch. 9 questions in total, I answered all of them correctly, although one of them I figured out it's DP but didn't have time to figure out details because I was only given 5 minutes to work on the problem ( the next interviewer was waiting). I did use hints for solving some of the problems. I felt really good about the interview. A week later, I got rejected and recruiter said she couldn't give me any feedback.
I can only think of two possible reasons for rejection:
1. They only hire engineers who can come up with perfect solution in 5 minutes which is not what they claim in interview tip video that they want to see the brute force solution first and they want to see the analytical skills.
2. They rejected me for factors outside of interview
I felt the 2nd reason is more likely for my case and they rejected me due to my experience, age, and/or lack of ivy league education. In the past I got offer by top company with worse interview performance. This is ridicules, they seem to have a mysterious formula to determine whether you are a good fit. They can pretty much figure it out from my resume, why waste my time and energy on the interview! It cost me $500 to take PTO.
The interview lasted about a day, with 5 different interviewers. For each section, the technical questions took most of the part. They also showed me their office in Toronto, which was nice
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What was the most difficult problem you solved during your last job?
it was difficult. lengthy dsa questions. design was ok. needs nice preperation. googlyness also needs preperation. it was difficult. lengthy dsa questions. design was ok. needs nice preperation. googlyness also needs preperation.
One of the interviewer seemed disintered about core tack and focused on AI only. No techinical project wer considered ven if they were highly rated by peers an the community
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