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Google Interview Questions & Reviews in Mountain View, CA

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Updated Feb 13, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
Ratings are reflective of location and job title.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 340 ratings

3.5

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 340 ratings

Positive	41%
Neutral	37%
Negative	22%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 4+ weeks)

Did 2 phone interviews. Quite good overall, and the interviewers seemed friendly, but I also got the impression from one of them that he did not give too much importance to the interviewing process. The second interviewer did not call at first, but a new interview was rescheduled. It is quite strange though to be waiting for what you feel is an important phone call that doesn't come. Then I had to reschedule again because this time I was not available on that date, since I was relocating to a different city. You have to really be sharp and have the right idea on the spot to qualify. Had to talk all the time. Test your code with small examples.

Interview Questions

data structures and array manipulation questions.

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Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 weeks)

Got the interview through campus recruiting. First round was two onsite interviews with a tour of the office and an overview of the company, second round was onsite 3 interviews. The interview itself was pleasant, I got breakfast or lunch or both. I had the chance to talk to a lot of people, and generally everyone was really helpful. The questions ranged from manipulating arrays and linked lists to small code reviews.

Interview Questions

Given two sorted integer arrays, write an algorithm to get back the intersection.

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Given the daily values of a stock, find how you can lose the most with one buy-sell trading.

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Given a set of strings, a number 'n', and a function that takes a string and gives back a score, find the n largest scored strings in the set.

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Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

Due to previous interactions I had a shortened interview process. I only had to do two phone screens. The first interviewer seemed uninterested although he wasn't rude by any means. I was concerned that I wasn't engaging enough for him. He asked about my resume and pretty standard interview questions.

Second interview went a lot better. I felt like she was testing my knowledge of Google and how if I fit into the culture. She was very nice and seemed interested in actually speaking to me.

Interview Questions

Tell me about a time you had to overcome differences within a team environment.

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Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 days)

HR send me a questionnaire with 10-20 questions which include behavior questions and technical questions. After sending them my answers, I got contacted for a first round phone interview (technical). The interviewer asked two sets of questions: one is academic such as probability and statistical inference, the other was open questions highly related to Google's current product or Google's need.

Interview Questions

Typical Bayesian question

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What metrics do you use to evaluate two search engines?

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Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Aug 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 months)

After being recruited by Google for an Interaction Designer position I spent 3 months going through the infamous Google interview process. From the start I told the recruiter I was interviewing for a position that I didn't have the required technical skills listed in the description (Computer science degree). He told me Google was trying to incorporate designers that were more creative and the description was out dated. Sounded good so I moved forward. I had three seperate phone interviews that went well, followed by a 3 hour design "test". after which they asked me to come in for the big group interview.

The in-person process is strange in that you don't meet with anyone that you will directly work with, it's all people you might work with. Every employee is required to interview potential new hires a few time a month along with taking interviewees to lunch.

When I first showed up at 8 AM they rushed me into a room with 5 strangers and they began to immediately attack the 3 hour "test" project I submitted two weeks earlier. It was annoying nitpicking for 40 minutes straight. Once I was finally able to go into my presentation showing my work and history they didn't seem interested, I was only able to get through a few screens in the remaining 15 minutes, they asked me every question possible about the technical aspects of my work with little about the design, claiming they were trying to get at how I think.

After that I went to one on one interviews, with each person focusing on a different topic. Everything seemed to be going much better then the presentation until I met with the technical interviewer. Turns out they wanted someone who could hand code in HTML, they wanted me to code a site on a white board and place some code that would make the site not work. Even though I explained to the recruiter in the beginning of the process that I'm a designer/creative director with some coding skills, but by no means an expert.

When I received my call two weeks later I was told they passed me up for a designer with more technical skills then myself. BIG waste of my time, if any of the people that I would actually be working with looked at my work before bringing me in they would have realized I wasn't a programmer and could have made the call on whether I would work in that position. It was a good learning experience though, one I won't go through ever again.

On a side note, the campus is amazing but it seemed every corner I turned there was some sort of company centric "I love Google" propaganda. It's a bit much especially when one of my interviewers told me he hated his life for the first 4 years of his time there.

Interview Questions

Can you code an entire webpage with this marker on a white board in 10 minutes? And add hidden issues to see if I'm able to find them.

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Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Presentation and a Skills Test.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 2+ weeks)

I met the company's representative on campus and applied through their website and I received an email soon after asking me to select my preferences for the on-campus interview. The interview was tough, but if someone is thorough with the topics and has practiced quite a few problems then it should be manageable.

Interview Questions

Given a a new dictionary of words in English alphabets but the ordering of the alphabets are not necessarily as the English alphabets, that is, say c comes a in the new alphabet series. Hence, the dictionary would also contain words in a different ordering than the usual dictionary. If you are given enough words in this new dictionary so that you can find enough relationships between the new series, find the new series.

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Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

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Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 4+ weeks)

Applied for the job in April and didn't hear anything until October. Out of the blue got an invitation for a phone interview not with a recruiter but with the hiring manager. Recruiter was friendly and scheduled the interview quickly. I had a good chat with the hiring manager from the sustainable operations team. She was hard to read at first and not particularly chatty. Asked only specific questions related to the job. Both experience working with different internal company groups (accounting, legal, etc.) and technical. How to evaluate additionality of a carbon offset and given some parameters, was a certain project a good investment. By the end we were having more free dialogue. About 4 days later recruiter contacted me via email to chat via phone. Spoke candidly on the phone. I guess they thought I was a good candidate and wanted to fly me out for the next phase of interviewing, but had 2 others scheduled for in-person interviews that week. Following those interviews, they called to let me know that they were planning to make an offer to another candidate and would keep in touch if that fell through. The recruiter was very friendly and forthcoming with details and kept in touch well. Ultimately I'd love to work for Google but the stars didn't align this time.

Interview Questions

How would you evaluate whether a carbon offset project is additional?

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Given a set of paramters, including IRR of two different projects. Would Google invest in the more efficient of the two boilers?

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Describe your experience working with crossfunctional teams

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Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

I had two technical phone interviews after going through HR questions. In the first interview, I was asked about my research and background. They did not care about what language I use in a coding question.

In the second interview, the interviewer was very strange. He did not ask any of my background or personal questions. When I said Hello, he identified my name then started asking a coding question right away. His accent was so strong yet he was speaking too fast that I could not really understand what he was saying, particularly for such a challenging question. He looked like he made judgment from the moment I received his call as he did not seem to care about assisting to answer the question (most of other interviewers from a big company do assist). I immediately noticed that I was not going to satisfy this person but I gave my best for an hour.

Interview Questions

Describe your research background.

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Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 weeks)

Ever since I joined LinkedIn, I've been receiving emails from Google recruiters. I replied to the first one saying that as I'm an established contractor with my own company its difficult to switch to permanent employment. The emails kept coming in on a monthly basis. After around a year, I was on the look out for something different so I decided to look into it. The job description looked interesting and matched the work I'd been involved with in the previous years.
I had the initial pre-screening which had some technical questions and we discussed the role a little.
A week later I was offered a technical phone interview. It started with one question, which kept getting expanded until it covered a wide range of topics. It was clear they were after someone who knew how to approach a new problem, rather than someone who had memorized a bunch of commands suitable only for a particular situation. I felt it went really well, except at the end when I made some silly mistakes, but it was 10pm on a Friday, so I'm sure most people wouldn't be completely switched on at that point. Over all the interview was positive - it was relevant to my skills and the questions were fair.

A few more days passed and I got an email saying that they don't have any jobs which match my qualifications, with the usual "thank you for your interest in our company etc.." Not knowing what that really means, I wrote back asking for a reason, and feedback on the technical interview. I explained where I thought I went wrong, and asked if that was the issue. I only got another email thanking me for my interest in the company and to try again in a few months.

As I only had the technical interview, I was expending something like... "we need someone with more experience/knowledge in xxx", or "someone who has used xxx for xxx years". I did get the impression from the emails that there actually was no job available which was waiting to be filled, but they are constantly on the lookout - in the same was that job agencies sometimes post bogus jobs on job boards to get candidate information, and find out where gaps are in the job market.

I fail to see how applying again in a few months will change things as I'm not sure what went wrong, so will probably make the same mistake again, unless asked exactly the same questions.

Interview Questions

Topics: Filesystems, networking, scripting
I will not write the question

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Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 4 weeks)

After recruiter's phone call with general organizational questions, I had short technical phone interview.
Interviewer was late for 10 minutes, thus we talked only 30-35 min. For this time he was able to ask me not very much: some of my previous experience, most difficult bug I've faced recently, and one technical question with coding in shared doc. After that he let me to ask him something about google. He answered one question and finished interview, so I had no change to fund out everything I planned. Also I had a feeling, the guy was not interested to be there, coz he was not leading me through resolution process and talked very little. Also his communication skills could be better - I hardly understood his questions in Indian English and asked to repeat several times. Google should sent better skilled and more open English speakers to interview, IMHO.
I successfully resolved technical coding question in two different ways (time and memory efficient) with commenting my resolution thoughts, but have got negative response from recruiter in 1 week.