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

I wish, I had the following information when I walked into my phone screen, hopefully it will help someone out there.

Here is the format of my 1st phone screen with a PM (45 minutes long).

* Interviewer talks about his/her background (3~5 mins)
* Two general questions - tell me about yourself and why do you want to work here? (5 ~ 10 mins)
* Product questions - design and strategy (25~30 mins)
* Questions for the interviewer (last 5 mins)

My interviewer asked me 3 product questions so you are looking at 10~15 minutes per question.

I was caught off guard when my interviewer cut me short while I was flushing out solutions for a product design.

My recommendation, ask your interviewer how much time you have for the question or roughly how many product questions they have in mind so that you are not caught off guard like me.

On average, if the interviewer expects you to take 15 minutes for a product design problem then you don't have a lot of time for each of the below steps. You probably want to focus most of your attention on pain points and design (5 mins each).

* Define the user personas
* Define the pain points
* Prioritize the pain points
* Brain storm the solutions for the pain points
* Come up with a rough design for the solution
* Define success metrics for your solution

Product design is an iterative process, you will find better user personas, pain points and solutions as you go through the process. Be mindful about getting stuck in analysis paralysis and remember to touch on the key elements of the process.

Good luck, the process is not perfect, don't beat yourself up if you don't make it.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Google.

Interview

The first round consists of two back to back interviews, the first one was behavioral/hypothetical questions, second one was web technologies and an area of expertise that I chose (databases).

Some behavioral questions i was asked were:
“Tell me about yourself”
“Tell me about a project where you had to come up with a solution that was data-driven.”
“Describe the most demanding problem you’ve solved.” They want you to answer STAR format. They also asked follow up questions like “what steps did you take to understand the problem”, “did you consider any other solutions”, and “why was the solution you chose the best”.
A hypothetical question they asked was:
“Imagine you are tasked with improving customer satisfaction from 80% to 90% without a budget or additional people. What steps would you take?” Here they want you to ask for more information. You will also need to make some assumptions to solve the problem, like assume you will have a team, that you have historical data, etc.
For the technical interview, they asked me questions like:
“If a company wants users of its website to be able to browse for items, add items to a shopping cart, and to be able to continue browsing without losing the items in their cart, how would the company go about doing that?”
This question was testing knowledge of cookies. Be able to explain what a cookie is, the main reasons they’re used, and know where they’re stored.
“What is http?”
For the database part:
“What is a database?”
“What is database normalization?”
“When would you not want to normalize a database?”
“What is sql?”
Then they opened up a google doc and gave me 3 tables: A student, enrollment, and course. I was asked to write basic sql queries to answer the problems i was given. Knowing basic sql should prepare you for this section.

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Google.

Interview

Recruiting very lax at follow up with candidates. Quick reach outs for setting up interviews, then crickets. Multiple attempts to get updates go unanswered or no response. No feedback is provided.

Interview

It was very nice. I liked interviewing here I only made it to the phone screen but it was good. It was very nice. I liked interviewing here I only made it to the phone screen but it was good.

Interview

I was a contractor and had two 30 mins Google hang out a interviews, simple process. Everyone who nice & engaging, it felt like a conversation more than an interview

Interview

The interview process was a very process intensive program. I sent in my resume and after that a few emails to the hiring manager, who was potentially just a human resources employee.

Interview

i interviewed with google for their software engineer intern position. I was sent a coding challenge beforehand. The interview was a mixture of technical and behavioural questions. All were easy/medium leetcode style questions.

Application

I applied online. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Google (San Francisco, CA (US)).

Interview

I interviewed for this position in San Francisco in May 2020 - first round of interviews was with a recruiter who was initially very nice. He sent me prep materials and set up the next round of interviews with two ABPs. Both ABPs were nice although I clicked with one of them more than with the other one. Besides that, everything went well and I was anxious to hear back from the recruiter.
The recruiter got in touch with me 5 days after promised date to tell me “good and bad news.” Good news was that I passed the second round of interviews with the ABPs (yay!) and the bad news was that Google was on a hiring freeze due to COVID-19. The only feedback I got was that he got really positive feedback from the two ABPs - He couldn’t provide any details due to ADA compliance. He asked me to check in with him every couple of months to see if hiring was resumed to set up a third and final round of interviews with the hiring managers/teams. In the meantime, he asked that I fill out a post interview candidate experience survey that I’d be receiving via Email. He mentioned that the survey would ‘seem’ like it was the end of my candidacy and I was no longer considered for the position but to disregard it and not “freak out”since I was still very much considered for the role once hiring resumed. I took the survey which was primarily about The recruiter - gave all A’s and positive feedback since, that’s what I believed at the time.
Checked in with him in late July and got a very fast response saying that hiring is still on hold but he remembers me and will reach out as soon as things pick up again. Saw a post for the position in October so I reached back out asking if hiring resumed and.... nothing. Sent a follow up email a week later (hey, maybe my email fell thru the cracks) and.... nothing.
Did I just get ghosted by the recruiter? It seems that way. I tried to come up with possible explanations; was he okay? Perhaps he was no longer with the company? Did he move? I’m sure that Google would have handled above scenarios with grace since, well, it’s Google. My conclusion is that instead of being honest with me, he told me what I wanted to hear to trick me into providing positive survey feedback - and, once that survey was done, so was I. Sadly, I would’ve provided the same feedback even if he told me that I didn’t pass the second round of interviews so the unwarranted ghosting.
I expected more from the recruiter and from Google.