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Google Interview Questions & Reviews in Santa Monica, CA

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Updated Dec 6, 2011 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
Ratings are reflective of location and job title.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 9 ratings

4.1

“Very Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 9 ratings

Positive	33%
Neutral	44%
Negative	22%

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5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 in Santa Monica, CA (took a day)

They asked a lot of situational question to see how you would handle situations (i.e. if a client wants 40 ads created in 1 day how would you handle this). The craziest question they asked was how many people do you think are one their cell phone in the entire world at this very moment.

Interview Questions

How many people do you think are using their cell phone in the entire world at this very moment?

Answer Question

Other Details

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

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Helpful Interview?

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Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 in Santa Monica, CA (took 1 week)

I was approached by a Google recruiter based on my LinkedIn profile. After an initial phone conversation to assess me and my proclivities, they arranged a couple of interviews. The interview in Santa Monica consisted of an in-person interview with the hiring manager and lasted for almost 2 hours. The guy was intelligent and sincere. He tested my knowledge, which was adequate for the position. Unfortunately, the position was not interesting enough for me, and we agreed that it wasn't a good fit. Very pleasant experience, exciting company, and I hope there are other departments that would be a better fit.

Interview Questions

What is your familiarity with Google Goggles?

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Other Details

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

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Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2011 in Santa Monica, CA (took 5+ weeks)

I was contacted by a recruiter from Google Southern California (Irvine and Santa Monica) through LinkedIn and was asked if I had any interest in applying to Google. I replied yes and then had a phone call with the recruiter (about 40 minutes) to talk about my background and experience, and the recruiter talked about the interview process and answered all my questions. The recruiter was amazingly nice and very easy to talk to. The first thing I had to do was choose an office to apply to. I chose Santa Monica and asked for 2 weeks to study before the first phone interview.

Two weeks later I had the phone interview. I was very nervous but my nerves calmed down as soon as I started talking to the interviewer, he was friendly and the interview felt more like we were a team working on a problem together rather than an interview (to some extent). It was very casual and the problems were interesting. The interviewer gave me a few tips and clues when I got stuck, but overall I felt like I did pretty well.

One week later, the recruiter contacted me to announce I passed the phone interview and was invited to an onsite interview at the Santa Monica office. The onsite interview was scheduled for a week after that (so 2 weeks after the phone interview). I arrived at the building, but they have 3 buildings and I showed up at the wrong one! Way to make a good first impression, I felt so stupid. So if you have an interview there, make sure to follow the directions they give you by email instead of googling "Google Santa Monica" for the location.

The onsite interview consisted of five 45 minutes 1:1 interviews back to back with a lunch with an engineer in the middle. Four of the interviewers were male software engineers in their early 30s, one was older (50s). All of them were nice and friendly and made the experience very pleasant. All but one of the interviewers made me feel like I was already part of the team and that we were just working together on a problem.

The lunch was a little more awkward. The guy was older than me (50s) so we didn't have much in common (I am in my late 20s) and he was very hard to talk with. I had some questions and conversation topics ready to make sure the lunch would go smoothly, but I ran through all my questions in about 10 minutes because he only answered with "yes", "no", or a few words. He never asked me anything or made any effort to keep the conversation going. You could tell he was a nice guy, nothing wrong with him, just not a talker. Seems like a weird choice for a interviewee lunch, the whole thing felt like an uphill battle against awkward silence. The lunch was probably the most stressful part of the whole interview day!

At the end of the day, I left the onsite interview feeling confident and happy. The problems had all been interesting and I really did enjoy most of the interviewers. One week later I received an email from the recruiter saying I was not selected for the job. I think I did pretty well, I guess I was not quite quick enough with my answers.

Other Details

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

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took a day)

Process is hiring by committee. Interviewer was entirely focused on college achievements despite the fact that I'm a professional with over 10 years of experience.

Interview Questions

What clubs did you run in college?

Answer Question

What type of charity work have you done?

Answer Question

Other Details

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

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Helpful Interview?

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Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took 3 weeks)

The whole interview process was comprised of two phone interviews, and on-site interview. The first phone interview was from an HR, and the second was a technical interview in which I was asked several basic CS problems but no algorithm development or online coding.
After that I was invited to fly to Santa Monica, CA for in-person interview. The interview insisted of 5 round of interviews. The content included algorithm, system design, and so on. I though I was doing fine, but after one week, I got a call from the HR told me that I was not accepted due to lacking of working experience. However, the overall process was smooth, the interviewers were nice and friendly. The questions are not really so hard to answer.

Interview Questions

Give the descending order of the following 4 terms, assume that n is infinite. n!(n factorial), n^n, 2^n, n^(google)

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Convert decimal number 99 to base 7.

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Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.

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5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took 3 months)

Recruiter started off professional. Originally contacted by someone in Mtn View and then transferred to someone in Santa Monica.

Phone interview was intense, but I did my best. I felt like I got most of the questions wrong. My interviewer walked me through any incorrect answers and overall it was a pleasant experience. The interviewer was very good. Most of my questions were about searching and sorting, about half of them were the stupid questions from their database. He asked a good 10-15 questions during our phone call but most were short. Unlike most people, for some reason I was not asked any coding questions.

The on-site interview was a disaster.

1. It started with a discussion of my thesis topic which was fine. Expect them to understand your topic no matter how esoteric or specific it is.
2. A second interviewer asked about my thesis. He did not like my topic at all claiming that it doesn't scale well. Well, excuse me for not having access to Google's data! Then proceeded to ask some dumb questions (specific to Java) from their database. Finally, I started coding on the board. If I did something wrong, he was very misleading in the "hints" that he was trying to give; he could not articulate what the problem was with my code.
3. I had lunch with my phone interviewer. It went fine, but Google food is not all it is cracked up to be. The others that I met during lunch seemed stressed out, but friendly.
4. No comments on next interviewer as he was pretty good.
5. HORRIBLE interviewer. Very arrogant, very condescending, very intimidating. He asked a very esoteric question that was very confusing and required me to read a manual before attempting to answer the question.
He was very rude and mean to me and made it clear that he did not want to be there. I really just wanted to walk out of the room.
6. At this point I was shot. This interviewer asked me a question and while I was coding, I did something wrong. She said the problem was giving her a "headache" so we would move on to something else, just like that. The next question was better and was more pleasant.

My recruiter told me to use whatever language I was most comfortable with. I specifically asked if I could use Python and she said "yes". I know Java, C and C++ but they are not my everyday languages. To my dismay, most of the questions were phrased "Used Java" or "Use C, C++ or Java" or "use C or C++". One of my interviewers did not even know Python. My first recruiter KNEW point blank that Python was my everyday language and said that was perfect for this interview. Apparently, I should have never even been recruited since I do not program in Java/C/C++ as an everyday thing. I was also told that the interview is about how you "think" which is not at all true. You need to know very specific things about algorithms, design patterns, and object-oriented programming, so read books before the interview.

I was told that I would hear within a week. I never did. I had to call the recruiter and she pretended that she was going to tell me my result that day anyway.

The recruiting process is wrought with bad information and too much power is given to the recruiters. Until they get this right, they will continue to hire the mediocre people that I have read so much about.

Interview Questions

How would you sort 10 million phone numbers?

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How would you implement a singleton in the language of your choice?

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Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a Group/Panel Interview and a Personality Test.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took 4+ weeks)

Received an email from a Google recruiter and scheduled a phone interview for the following week. The phone interview was technical in nature, but the questions only required short replies. It seemed to primarily be to verify the accuracy of my claims on my resume.

A week later, the on site interview was scheduled. This consisted of five one-hour 1:1 interviews, all technical in nature. 1-2 questions were asked during this time, with a few minutes spared at the end for questions I had.

Two weeks later I received a call informing me that an offer was not be extended to me.

Interview Questions

Write a function in C/C++ that returns the number of zeros contained in the factorial of the number that is passed to it.

View Answers (5)

Other Details

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

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took a day)

This was the second phone interview, the first being with a recruiter. I spoke with an engineer at google and he asked me some general c++ questions (malloc/polymorphism/virtual functions/etc) and then gave me a problem to write an algorithm for (find the next in a sequence of numbers). The interviewer gave me some hints along the way, but unfortunately I was stuck for a good 10 minutes on one of his hints that turned out to be a misunderstanding between us. I verbalized everything I was doing along the way to try to make things as clear as possible. I didn't get the answer correct in the end. He told me how to see where the sequence goes, but I don't understand how he would decide to use that approach. I feel like i would have no problem writing the algorithm but i don't know how he arrived at the solution. It wasn't a very positive experience overall.

i don't expect to be asked for an in-person interview.

Interview Questions

you have a sequence where each number is a multiple of 2 or 5 (so: 2^i * 5^j). he gave the beginning of the sequence as 1,2,3,4,5,8,10,16... and asked me to find an algorithm to calculate the next number in the sequence.

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Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and 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 Feb 2010 in Santa Monica, CA (took 2 weeks)

Applied for a Software Engineer position. I was contacted by a recruiter for some general questions and background information. I was then instructed that I'd be receiving a call the following week from another software engineer for a technical screening. The engineer called me and went over a few technical questions regarding mainly javascript and running time (big O). I was then asked to provide 2 algorithms in code within an hour after the call. Overall the interview seemed to go well....as so I thought.

I wasn't contacted until the following week of the results. I was turned down but they cannot give you any information of why you didn't meet their standards. They won't tell you if your code is wrong, where you went wrong or where you could improve as a developer. Just a standard "your skills don't meet our needs at this time" response. Kind of disappointing given that you prepare for hours upon hours of your time and energy and receive 0 feedback.

How can you prepare? Well, I went over all of my old CS 101 notes, hash tables, data structures, and all the theory behind it. It can be a bit overwhelming if you haven't visited that information for over a decade. My advice is to brush up on your theory and write some practical examples along those lines, like sorting an array using Merge sort in your favorite language. Don't worry about trying to get better in your languages...you either know it now or don't know it.

It's nearly impossible to prepare for everything for this position given that they don't hire a Javascript developer or C++ developer. They just hire developers in general and only the top 1% developers in the world, as they indicated. Don't bother asking about the position because you could be working on any number of projects and they will not give you any specifics.

Overall, I rate the experience a 2.5 out of 5. The interview questions I got weren't terribly difficult, but I don't know where I went wrong or how I could improve since no feedback is given. That's where Google's policy needs to be revamped. The people I talked to were nice but don't expect any personality. It's very dry and straightforward and I'm not really sure if that's indicative of how people are there. The youtube video on working at Google seems like it's such a great place to work, but can't really say for sure at this time given my experience thus far with how they approach engineers.