Google Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA (US)) in April 2014.

Interview

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks.

The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple:
1) Dynamic Programming
2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs)
3) Probability related programs
4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough
5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,...
6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up.
7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape.
8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought.
9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience.
10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math.
11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know.
12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too!

Interview 1:
Graph related question and super recursion

Interview 2:
Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel.

Interview 3:
Array and Tree related questions

Interview 4:
Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs.

Interview 5:
Dynamic programming,
Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc.

At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems).

Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."

Application

I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google in April 2015.

Interview

Phone interview:
The Interviewer was late for 20 mins... Ask nothing on my resume.
Tow questions:
1) A string consists of ‘0’, ‘1’ and '?'. The question mark can be either '0' or '1'. Find all possible combinations for a string.
2) Give you a text file, remove duplicated lines.
    Follow up: If the file is very large, general hash map takes too much spaces, come up with a better solution.

Interview

Google's interview process is very long. It cant take several months to schedule the phone interview, onsite and follow up. The recruiters are very helpful with preparing you for the interview.

Application

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Google.

Interview

It was good, overall process was not intimidating. It was well suited to my talent and skill. I applied through a recruiter who I got in touch with online and she got me the interview, it went well overall.

Application

I applied online. The process took a week. I interviewed at Google.

Interview

I had a brief phone call with a recruiter than had a phone interview. During the interview, we dived right into coding... in a Google doc. It was supposed to act as a whiteboard even though white-boarding is the worst way to evaluate someone.

The entire interview was unrealistic including the questions. Only knowing JavaScript mattered.

To Google: Let people other than obnoxious white men interview candidates.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Google.

Interview

Technical Phone interview: They asked me a programming problem to solve which requires knowledge of algorithms and data structures. It was like any standard phone screening interview at one of the big tech companies.

Interview

I got referred and applied for SWE summer intern in September. No one contacted until December. I got an email and did an online assessment shortly after and solved both questions. I got rejected a few days later (probably due to lack of headcount / team matching?)

Interview

The interview process had multiple steps including phone screens and on-site interviews that used google hangouts. They also had me rank the three locations that I would be interested in for Google.

Interview

Did an initial coding challenge consisting of 2 questions. Then did 2 back-to-back phone interviews each consisting of doing a coding challenge with a Google employee. It was overall pretty good, everyone I interacted with was respectful and nice.

Interview

series of interviews. both phone and onsite rounds. spoke with team and hiring manager. fairly standard. took a while to get back to me. whole process was a few weeks long. everyone was nice.