Google Interview Questions &amp; Reviews in New York City, NY Area

More Google BOLD Internship Interviews

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2010 in New York, NY (took 4 weeks)

* Write iterator class encapsulating in-order traversal of a binary tree. What is a time complexity? What is a worst case?

* You have a collection of html documents grouped by a source web site . You need to count frequencies of bi-grams across all documents and present it in a sorted order (may be return top N frequent bi-grams). How would you approach it? How to filter out non-significant bi-grams? How to distribute and merge? What data structures to use to keep counters?

* OOP. Write classes representing expression tree for a simple calculator. You care only about constants and basic binary operators. Write function evaluating expressions.

* N clients - M servers. Each server can handle limited number of queries/sec. How to improve availability and performance ?

* Write code to shift a string with rotation [a, b, c << 2 = 2 c, a, b]

* How to count frequencies of characters in a string. What if the string is too huge? When is it reasonable to distribute across machines? How to find the most frequent character in the distributed scenario with a minimum data exchange between machines?

* You are given a huge stream of geo coordinates. Unordered. Return list of objects in a specified radius from some point X.

Interview Questions

Count bi-grams in a huge collection of documents grouped by source web site.

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2011 in New York, NY (took 5 days)

Phone interview started off easy with basics of C++ since that is the OO Language of choice. Then it progressed into some really simple problem solving questions which is messed up but managed to solve a whole 10 minutes later after an awkward pause because of all the pressure of talking to Google, but i recovered later on in the data structures questions. If you come to think of it the problem solving question was part of an algorithm question too. I was too excited ... didn't sleep the night before, couldn't think straight and completely messed up. Moral of the story : Get plenty of sleep on the night before.

Interview Questions

Why did you Pick C++ instead of any other dynamic languages out there?

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Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 in New York, NY (took 5+ weeks)

Applied online. Was contacted by a recruiter immediately and a phone interview was scheduled. Later, was called for a 1:1 interview session in NY. 4 interviews. Got a 'No' in a week after I returned.

Interview Questions

Phone Interview:
i) Find the number of inversions in an array (describe & code)
ii) Find collinear points in a given set of 2D points (describe & code)

View Answers (4)

Onsite:
Can't reveal the questions - signed NDA.
The questions consisted of algorithm design, implementation. Designing solution to large problems and speaking them out/writing them out.
Interviewers were nice. I was not good enough :)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2010 in New York, NY (took 4+ weeks)

I applied for a position on my school's career center website and was contacted much later by Google asking me to re-apply for a different position (the Technical Services Associate for DoubleClick.) I was asked to apply for that on Oct 18th and was contacted by Google on Nov 1 to set up a 30 min phone interview. I was called for my phone interview and my interviewer very quickly introduced himself and immediately asked me to explain Web 2.0 to someone who doesn't know what the internet is. Then he asked me to tell him what I envisioned for Web 3.0 and then again after I answered that for Web 4.0. I was asked behavioral questions after that. For example, "Tell me about a boss or manager you've worked for who you've admired and how you've taken skills you admired about them and applied them to your leadership positions." He only asked me questions for less than 15 minutes, then I asked him questions for the next 15. That being said, I thought the interview went terribly and was shocked to receive a second round invite on Nov 16th (the onsite interviews would be on Nov 19th.) I arrived at the office and waited in the lobby with two other people interviewing for the same position. We were escorted to our interview rooms and had three thirty minute interviews in a row. I was asked questions like, "How would you handle an angry customer if you worked a lightbulb company and they called to yell at you because their lightbulbs weren't working?", "How would you go about estimating the number of food places in NYC?", "If you have a 3 gallon container and a 5 gallon container and an unlimited supply of water, how do you get 4 gallons of water?", "Estimate the number of active Androids in the United States. (and actually come up with a number)", "Walk me through your resume in one minute.", "Explain DoubleClick to a 10 year old.", "What's your passion?"

Interview Questions

What do you envision for Web 4.0?

Estimate the number of active Androids in the U.S.

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2010 in New York, NY (took 3 weeks)

I sent my resume into google without reviewing the site or google job requirements. I was called for a 1st level phone screening which was easy. The recruiter was very nice and got back to me quickly and we moved onto the 1st phone screening.

I have been non hands on for a few months so the phone screening was a bit more challenging then it should have been. The interviewer wanted in depth answers like how the struct and bits were aligned.

Note: review your C and comp sci {algorithms, unix system engineering, etc}. I strongly suggest reviewing 'Design of the Unix Operating System' before going into this interview.

Interview Questions

How would you sort an array of one billions integers?

View Answers (5)

Other Details

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

More Google Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2010 in New York, NY (took 3 weeks)

Was contacted by Google initially, asked for up to date resume. Then had phone screen checking for where I'd like to work and what I'd like to do, followed by a technical phone screen which consisted of a a few technical questions and a programming problem done over Google docs. Once this was passed, was offered to interview at the New York office with five 1 on 1 interviews over one day. Was notified shortly after interview that no offer would be extended.

Would recommend applicants review as many programming puzzles as possible and know all your data structures and algorithms inside and out, especially all Big O notation stuff. Google makes this clear during the process and gives you helpful websites to brush up pre-interview.

Interview Questions

This is not a question from the day but gives you an idea of what to expect.

Given an array of numbers and another number, work out whether the array of numbers can be manipulated using standard mathematical techniques to equal the other number given. e.g. given 5 and 10, can you make 50? 5 * 10 = 50, so yes.

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Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 in New York, NY (took a day)

The hiring process what pretty smooth. I was contacted by the HR who set up the initial phone screens. After a couple of the phone screens, i was invited over for in person 1:1 interviews. The interviewrs were pretty smart and generally nice. They did offer a bit of help during interviews. I guess the important thing is the think aloud and make sure they can jump in and help you out if possible.
I liked the overall atmosphere there and love google products.

Interview Questions

Questions related to data stuctures and algorithms.

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Aug 2010 in New York, NY (took 3 weeks)

Getting the Interview was relatively simple. I knew a couple of well-connected people there. Went in for an interview with 4 product managers (1 lunch casual interview) and 1 technical lead. All the Product Manager interviews went well. I stumbled on the Technical interview which was no surprise. I don't have a Computer Science background and have never productized anything on the web. My focus is on mobile products. So I knew that it was a long shot. And it wasn't a surprise when the recruiter called a week later and informed me that I wouldn't get an offer because of my lack of software experience and knowledge about the Web in general. For the record, I informed them that I had these blatant holes in their general requirements prior to the interview and they insisted that I go through the typical process. The folks I knew there that referred me wanted me to join Google because of specific experience I had from a previous employer.
Little grief over this - I'm not sure it would have been a good fit for me. I asked every interviewer whether Google was a Software company or a Product company. The unanimous response was Software. I'm a Product guy.

Interview Questions

Design a better toothpaste tube

Design a compression algorithm

What Google products do you like? How would you make one of them better?

What Non-Google products do you like? How you would make one of them better?

How would you make Web browsing faster?

More Google Product Manager Interviews

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and an IQ/Intelligence Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2010 in New York, NY (took 3 days)

Google is a great company with great work ethics. You will realize this as soon you talk to the HR. They are very polite and gives a good understanding of the interview process and enough materials for preparation.
Here's is the details of my First Phone Interview -
The technical interview are all programming interview and data structure based.
It started with some basic java questions like describe threads, inheritance, abstract vs interfaces, static, final.
I was next asked to describe a shortest path algorithm in a graph.
I was then asked about a solution for file upload issue that interviewer has faced. It was like there was some issue in uploading more then 3 files at a time. So how will you restrict that only 3 files are uploaded at a time where user can enter any number of files. So basically 3 files at a time till all the files are done.
My answer was will maintain a count variable. He asked me alternate solution's. I said we can use a stack. He then asked me to write the code using the stack solution. He had the google doc window shared where i wrote the code.

Interview Questions

Different ways of implementing

Other Details

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