Google Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – The recruiter set up my first technical interview with an engineer in CA.
My first technical interviewer asked me 4 questions in my phone interview. The interview was conducted over the phone and Google Docs where I would type my code. The questions were:

1. Describe a time at your job when you debugged / tested something but couldn't find what was wrong.
2. Describe a good test.
3. Coding question
4. Coding question

For the first coding question, the main one, I had to think about the answer and talk through what I was thinking with the interviewer. Talking through your thought process is a must for Google interviews, if you simply say nothing, the only thing the interviewer has to go off of is the correctness of your answer rather than the approach you're using and your reasoning for it, so if the answer is wrong, the interviews can not get you back on track. Eventually after I got the ball rolling, had no trouble solving the problem. The solution consisted of a 2D matrix rotation and a recursive flood fill algorithm. The interviewer gave positive responses for my solution, and did not ask how it could be improved.

I finished the problem with 20 minutes to spare, so the interviewer asked if I wanted to go over another problem and I said, "Sure". The next problem was a piece of C code which had errors in it, the interviews asked me to find the errors in the code and I found most of them given what the code actually was supposed to do. I don't think the interviewer actually cared very much about this portion since I don't believe he expected me to finish so early and the C question was just something to fill time. He then asked me if I had any questions so I asked him to describe what an average day was like for him and what he did. He was very thorough and we had an interesting conversation. After the phone interview was done my recruiter called me back the 2 business days later and told me I had done very well, and that Google wanted me to fly to Manhattan for my last interview set over the course of a day. Between flying to Manhattan ( 2 weeks after the recruiter called me back ) I studied my ass off. I reviewed every available resource to me online and offline prior to flying to Manhattan. I went to my primary coding review website (www.CodeEval.com) and solved every possible problem on this site.
Working as a back-end web developer for 10 months prior to this gave me some great knowledge about databases , object-oriented design and multi-threaded
applications. Some of the aforementioned skills and information is hard to get without having prior experience, in my opinion, especially if you're straight out of college.

I had 6 interviews onsite, 1 of the interviews wasn't an interview at all, and was really lunch / off-the-record conversation with another SET who had been working at Google for quite some time. The other 5 interviews were all very technical and mostly exclusively dealt with specific coding questions. I won't reveal specifically any of the interview questions here since I signed an NDA, but I will reveal the phone interview question (mentioned above) since that was prior to me signing the NDA. I will go into the general format of the questions at the onsite interviews. The first interview was with a young Software Engineer, who was around my age, probably 22. The question had to do with generating permutations in an efficient manner. He asked me for the complexity of my algorithm in terms of memory and run-time. He said my solution was correct off the bat and asked how the memory complexity could be improved. After talking out loud and exchanging ideas, I arrived out how to reduce memory complexity. The following 4 technical interviews were of the same format except the last which was a higher level design question that was mostly open. Be prepared to be asked questions about how to test your code, that being said, your code ought to be written such that it's decoupled and easy to test
rather than ONLY implementing the solution.

Another piece of advice I would give to someone is that wherever possible in my interview, point out how a problem can be threaded. I was specifically interviewing in Java, so I knew how to do this using the available components in Java. Google is a big company and any of the software that they build needs to be able to parralelized and scaled wherever it can be, the interviewers will be looking for this.

After the interview my onsite assigned recruiter said I would get a decision in less than 2 weeks, and after that, the offer stage would come.
About 4 weeks later I was called and told that I didn't get the job, despite my performance in the interviews which the recruiter told me was not bad.

Interview Details – 1. Recruiter screener (contractor): Pleasant, straight forward and helpful in providing next steps. Also provided context guidance which was also straight forward. To prepare to explain in detail how managed a couple of key projects. How handle obstacles and measure success.
2. Next level mixed. Pleasant but rushed. I had read here in Glassdoor that they don't give you time to think and it's true.

Interview Details – My resume was sent in through employee referral, and I was quickly contacted by someone to fill out my basic information. I was then told when I would receive a phone call to go over a few things. I also was required to send in my unofficial transcripts. After the phone screen, I was scheduled for a 30 minute phone interview. I tried to prepare as best as possible, doing a lot of research about the position and relating my experiences to the job requirements. However, I was unprepared to answer the most unexpected questions. I'm not sure if they just want to see if you can think on your toes, or wanted to hear a specific answer. It was a really difficult interview and I am not surprised that they did not move forward with my application afterwards. The interviewer was really friendly and didn't make me feel stupid for some of the ridiculous answers I gave. All I can say is be prepared to answer some obscure questions, even for simple entry-level roles.

Interview Details – The interview process was relatively straightforward; I went with an internal referral, and got past the first stage vet interview.

The interview consisted of two conversations with different engineers; one was a younger guy, and one was with a guy who had been at Google for some time. The questions were basic algorithms questions -- If you read "cracking the coding interview", you will be prepared. They make you sign an NDA regarding the questions, so I'll respect that

Interview Details – Just first round phone interview. HR set up a specific time and a link used for writing code in google doc. The whole interview took 45 minutes, plus question time. In the beginning of the interview, algorithm problems are asked from easy to hard. Time and space complexities are asked for each algorithm.

Interview Details – First I spoke to a recruiter. This person, like many recruiters, had no deep understanding of the role and was looking for keywords. Then, I was passed off to a second recruiter for more of an interview and coaching process, and administered a writing test via email. (All of this was by phone.) I was then sent to the Google campus (not in CA) to interview with two different people (in CA), via video conference. The first person had no idea who I was and was totally unprepared. The second person had the job I was interviewing for, and we had a much more productive discussion, but the video hung up right as I was about to ask my questions. No one was available to help with the equipment, nor show me out. When I called the recruiter to tell her our interview had been cut short, she didn't seem concerned and made no offer to let me ask my questions via email or resume the interview. It soured me on the company, for sure.

Interview Details – While I'd like to have more positive things to say, I don't. The feeling from the interview process is they are very unorganized and disconnected. The whole process took about 3 months between phone screen and final interview. Despite that, I never even got a email or phone call telling me I didn't get the role. I think it's a basic sign of respect to at least tell a candidate what their status is. In fact, it's been a year now, and they've still made no effort to reach out.

Interview Details – The interview lasted a whole day and was very grueling. It felt to me as though the questions were really aimed at recent Comp. Sci. grads. I didn't feel that the process really reflected the sort of work that I had been doing and the kind of work that I was hoping to get hired to do. We did touch on some questions specific to the task but these came at the end of the day and were almost perfunctory in comparison to the computer science type questions I got earlier in the day.

Interview Details – written test followed by a phone screening. 4 rounds of personal interviews after that