Google

Google Interviews

1. 4 May 2014

   Software Engineer Interview

   Anonymous Employee in Auburndale, FL

   Accepted Offer

   Positive Experience

   Difficult Interview

   Application

   I applied through an employee referral I interviewed at Google (Auburndale, FL) in Apr 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."