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Difficulty Rating [?]   Based on 163 ratings

“Difficult”
3.7

Interview Experience [?]   Based on 163 ratings

Positive 45%
Neutral 32%
Negative 23%

Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates (updated Feb 7, 2010).

Interviews for Top Jobs at Google
1 - 10 of 163 Google Interviews Sort by  

Platforms Engineering at Google

Posted Feb 7, 2010

5.0
Very Difficult Interview
Overall Negative Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2009 (took a day)

I received an e-mail from a recruiter. One of the employees referred me for summer internship. In the e-mail, it says that I should review algorithms/coding etc.. So, I reviewed basic algorithms for a day. I had 2 phone interviews with the engineers. They were on the same day, 45 minutes each. They were highly technical. No algorithms/coding questions at all.
All the reviews I read was mentioning those kind of questions, however they didn't ask me that kind of questions.Instead, they asked questions like " how do you calculate the power of a server?", "what is OS?", "what is scheduling?".. etc. It was hard, and I couldn't do well.

Interview Questions

Explain scheduling in OS

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Engineer at Google

Posted Feb 6, 2010

3.0
Average Interview
Overall Positive Experience Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Sep 2009 (took 2 weeks)

First a recruiter contacted me via phone and email and asked for some basic information. She explained their hiring standard is looking for good generalist, so I'll be interviewing with several engineers from different teams. Then she arranged one round of phone screening with a person, who asked about my resume questions and some simple programming and design questions. Then next stay she contacted me for arranging an onsite. The onsite was with 6 engineers, from 3 year googler to googler from start-up, including a very senior engineer/researcher. They are all very kind and interview is quick-paced. On average each asked 3-5 questions covering algorithm, coding, knowledge, experience, design, and my research. They passed on a piece of paper to avoid asking same questions.

Interview Questions

Out of my skillset, which aspect did I consider as my primary skill and they should consider a primary reason why they hire me.

Reason for Declining

Got a better offer from another company

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

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Software Engineer at Google

Posted Feb 6, 2010

4.0
Difficult Interview
Overall Positive Experience Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Dec 2009 in Pittsburgh, PA (took 3 months)

Applied for the position online. HR contacted to schedule telephone interview. I asked for 3 weeks time. HR sent some general information on how to prepare for interviews. "Programming interviews exposed" and tutorials on topcoders.com were included in the reference material. The telephone interview was 1 hr long. There were three questions. Towards the end the interviewer asked me to code the algorithm for the last question. There was not much time left. On site interview was scheduled about 1.5 months latter. There were 5 1-on-1 interviews and a lunch interview. 4 out of 5 interviews involved writing code on the board. The last interview was general discussion on how to design a solution for a distributed system that the interviewer explained.

Interview Questions

Why do you want to change your job?

Reason for Declining

They offered me Software engineer position in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). My personal interest is in working on product development. Moreover the compensation package is below average. It is below 25 percentile mark as per salary.com

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

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Software Engineer at Google

Posted Feb 3, 2010

4.0
Difficult Interview
Overall Positive Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2009 in New York, NY (took 2 weeks)

Two phone interviews. Both people were nice, but the technical guy was a little awkward. First was with the recruiter to talk about their opportunities and to make sure there was a slot I might fit in. Second one was about an hour technical screen that consisted mainly of two technical problems - one was easy, the other was difficult. The recruiter called me back a few days later to say that while I had done well on the technical problems, after reviewing my resume they determined there weren't any compatible open slots and to re-apply in a few months to see what was available.

Interview Questions

You're given a binary tree and pointers to two nodes in the tree. Describe the fastest algorithm you can come up with to determine the closest common ancestor.
You're writing an application that receives a stream of individual items of data. The stream may be very long or very short, but you have no way of knowing how long it is (i.e. there's no trick to figuring out the size of the stream of data). How would you go about choosing m items such that any subset of m items was equally likely? (Not an even distribution of values, but just that any m items are equally likely to be chosen). So for example, m=1000, and the number of items in the stream, n, may be 1000, or 10000, or 100000000, or much much larger; there is no way to know how many.

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Online Global Advertising Associate at Google

Posted Feb 3, 2010

4.0
Difficult Interview
Overall Positive Experience Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Nov 2009 (took 2 days)

During the phone interview I was asked questions pertaining to my skill set and at the end I was asked quirky questions like "how would you spend a million dollars?" After the phone interview, I was given a date for an in person interview but wasn't able to make it since I was living abroad. My recruiter arranged a video conference in which I was asked "how would you find a needle in a haystack." This was by far the most nerve wracking and still fun interview I've ever had. I studied the company and my division especially intensely.

Interview Questions

Why are manhole covers round?

Negotiation Details

I was not able to negotiate anything...except my start date.

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

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AdWords Associate at Google

Posted Feb 3, 2010

3.0
Average Interview
Overall Neutral Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2010 (took 3 weeks)

I applied via an internal referral with a cover letter and resume. About a week later I was emailed saying that I had to submit an updated resume, my transcript, and fill out an application. A few days after that I was emailed saying that I qualified for a first round phone interview. I had the interview a week or so later (I was out of town for when it was supposed to be scheduled) with someone in AdSense at the Mountain View office. I was really nervous and flustered, and was pretty sure the interview didn't go so great. A week later I received an email saying that they would keep my resume and application on file, but I wasn't a good fit for the start program.

Interview Questions

What is Google's next million dollar ida?
What could be improved on AdWords or Analytics?

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Software Engineer Intern - Arabic Language - Zurich at Google

Posted Feb 3, 2010

3.0
Average Interview
Overall Positive Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2008 in Zurich (took a day)

I applied for the position online. Two weeks later, I got an email from an intern recruiter who asked me some questions:

- What sort of internship project would you be interested in working on?
- What are your greatest strengths?
- How much coding do you do on a regular basis and what is your favorite programming language?
- When would you be available to start an internship, and for how long?
- Does your university require that you do an internship to complete your studies?
- What are your extra-curricular interests?

I replied to the questions and then I got another email asking me to rate myself in Algorithms and Data Structures. One week later I was scheduled a phone interview for the following week. I was advised to familarise myself with Google and their products.

The interview was a full interview for the role. It was conducted in English and lasted approximately 45 minutes. During the interview, the interviewer shared a Google Docs document with me to carry out some coding exercies.

The phone interview tests:

* Core computer science concepts

 - problem solving, analytical/design ability, technical competence

* Coding problems. Your interviewer may request you code in your preferred language rather than in pseudo-code

* Logic problems and algorithms

  - They want to understand your ability to develop complex algorithms

  - You should talk through your answer, explaining your logic

* Systems design

You should be able to explain how you come up with your solution – it helps your interviewer understand your thought processes

The interviewer asked me to talk about my university projects. Then, he described a problem and asked me to write a c++ (since I chose C++ as my favorite programming language) code to solve it. I made a couple of mistakes in the boundary conditions. The interviewer spotted them and asked me to see if there were any errors in my code. I noticed and corrected them. Then, i was asked about the time complexity of my solution and how to improve it. But, I failed to improve it. Then, he asked me if there were any questions I wanted to ask him .

A couple of weeks later I got an email informing me that my qualifications are not suitable for the position.

Interview Questions

Given an integer, write a c++ code that would count the number of bit positions that are set (1's)? What is the time complexity of your algorithm?

Assume you were asked to improve it such that you would get the results instantaneously. What would you do?

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Background Check.

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Software Engineer Intern at Google

Posted Jan 31, 2010

2.0
Easy Interview
Overall Positive Experience Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2009 (took 4+ weeks)

I applied on the Google website, a few days later got an email saying they wanted to two technical phone interviews. After those, there was a month period where I had to be matched up with a host. Then just another interview with him, and I got the offer. They had come to my college, and I also handed my resume to a recruiter, not sure if that had anything to do with it at all.

Interview Questions

Write ArrayList in Java.
How would you implement a stack with the additional operation of getMin?

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Software Engineer at Google

Posted Jan 24, 20101 of 1 people found this helpful

3.0
Average Interview
Overall Neutral Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2010 (took a day)

Phone interview with an engineer. He started with an introduction of himself and the position and then we dived right into a programming problem. He shared a Google Doc with me and asked me to type in the solution. Afterwards, he asked me some Java syntax questions.

Interview Questions

Given a string and a list of character mappings of the form (a=>j,k), (d=>r), (t=>r,q,e,y), print out all the possible variants by applying the mapping to the original string.
example:
string="foo", mappings = "o=>1,2", "k=>d,l,w"
output:
foo
fo1
fo2
f1o
f11
f12
f2o
f21
f22

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Communications at Google

Posted Jan 28, 2010

4.0
Difficult Interview
Overall Positive Experience Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2008 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 months)

I had 3 phone interviews in all. The first was a general interview about the hiring process and position with an HR coordinator. The second occurred about a week later. It was with an employee in the department of the position. I was then asked to write 3 essays - they gave me a choice of 5 prompts I think. Once I submitted that, I had another phone interview. The5 interviews were all pretty casual and conversational. A couple weeks after my third phone interview, they emailed me to tell me they wanted to fly me out to the Mountain View HQ for interviews. I did not receive any prep for these. They flew me out within a week, rented a car and booked a hotel room for the night. I think I had about 5 rounds of interviews with team members. Like the phone interviews, these were pretty conversational --- no quizzes or anything. A lot of convo about my past experiences and what I thought of the company, what I could offer, etc. Although I thought they went well, I was not offered a job.

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

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1-10 of 163 Interviews
Google Overview (GOOG )
Web
www.google.com
Industries
Size
5000+ Employees, $21B+ Revenue
HQ
Mountain View, CA
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The difficulty rating is the average interview difficulty rating across all interview candidates.

The interview experience is the percentage of all interview candidates that said their interview experience was positive, neutral, or negative.

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