Google Interview Questions &amp; Reviews in Seattle, WA Area

More Google Software Developer Interviews

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 in Kirkland, WA (took 2 months)

I applied online and after 2-3 weeks a recruiter contacted me, he was very helpful and friendly, we had an initial 30 min phone interview to tell me about the company and the interview process, then he scheduled me for two technical phone interviews back to back, each one is 1 hour. They asked the regular problem solving questions (Not very advanced) and 1 design question, i did well and the recruiter invited me to visit them to have a physical interview.

They arranged everything and i was supposed to be there 2 days before the interview, and leave 1 day after, but while travelling to them I encountered some problems ( due to latency in flights ), i finally reached there 1 day late and i lost my bag, and i had to be ready for the interview next day in morning, I asked the recruiter if they can postpone the interview 1 day, because its not fair to interview someone who has been travelling for 2 days and having a severe jet lag, but they refused. I finally went to the interview which consists of 6 back to back interviews, they varied in the difficulty of the questions, and you have to write code quickly to be able to finish the questions.

Interview Questions

I can't really tell about the question, but they vary between different problem solving questions like trees, string manipulations and complex recursion.

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2011 in Kirkland, WA (took a day)

My initial contact was with a recruiter who was very friendly. He scheduled a one-hour interview with a development manager. I was shocked that the entire decision was going to be based on one person's opinion especially for such a high-level position.

When I met the interviewer, he didn't even introduce himself. He was very standoffish and didn't seem to care about me whatsoever. In fact, he didn't even say hello, how are you doing, or ask anything about me at all - he just jumped right into interview questions. He didn't ask anything about my experience until 20 minutes into the interview and then he only cared about what I was working on currently.

Considering this was an interview for a development manager position, I expected more management questions. Instead it was highly technical. And, it wasn't really clear to me from the beginning what he expected. I guess Google only cares that they're managers be able to code instead of lead a team. (I've heard this from other people as well.)

Overall, this was the worst interview I've ever had in my entire career.

Interview Questions

Question about building a team and how to get them excited.

Other Details

The interview consisted of 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 2011 in Kirkland, WA (took 2 weeks)

A Google recruiter pinged me on LinkedIn for a possible opening at Kirkland. Soon after talking on the phone with the recruiter, a phone screen was scheduled. Did well, and within 2 weeks, an onsite was arranged. Although, the question quality and interviewers were great, I found the Google interview very unorganized. Sure, Google does not want interviewers to talk to each other to avoid spreading the influence. That is good. But there needs to be some coordination before hand. For example, I interviewed for a developer role, and none of the questions asked to me were on design/problem solving. About 80% questions required recursion use, and some were arcane (reverse polish notation, twisted graph).

I dont know what Google interviewers measure by asking such questions. To an extent, they were good questions (could not find any in book), but when 80% of questions require recursion use (discouraged in any production quality code), they test little about candidate's suitability for a job. I even gave the feedback to the recruiter, and she was nice enough to acknowledge the issue.

Although, I did not get an offer (fumbled on a couple of questions, including RPN) - I find the interview very intellectually stimulating.

Interview Questions

Given a graph, find if it represents a tree.

View Answers (3)

Priority inversion, and how to solve it.
Develop an iterator (has_next, next).

Find the longest word in a dictionary, such that the word can be built one character at a time, and all substrings are words in the dictionary. A new character can be added anywhere.

Discuss data structures for reading URL->File content (crawler data e.g.) and remove duplicates.

Find a number in a sorted array with duplicates in O(log n) time.

Card game, given 4 cards. If by +,-,/,* and () you can make 24, you win. Write a program to play this game.

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 (2)

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 in Kirkland, WA (took a day)

I don't really know what to think of it. The first interviewers question was extremely difficult. There is no way that it could have been completed in the 45 min that I was given, but I gave it my best shot. The guy argued with me about 2d arrays not being contiguous in memory... The second interviewer was completely the opposite in that it was absolutely easy, so easy I thought I was missing something and tried coming up with more efficient methods when there really wasn't any.

Interview Questions

Probably shouldn't disclose the first interview question as they made me sign an agreement and the first question was unique from anything I have seen as an interview question. This was a question that would not have been able to have been completed within the 45 min.

Fibonacci numbers... haha.

View Answers (3)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

Recruiter sent a link with study material. We scheduled a phone interview after I had some time to read up on the stuff you learn in College, but never use in a real job. Got a phone call, went straight to the questions. 3 Data Structures / Algorithm types of questions. Went through several optimizations of the same algorithm.

Interview Questions

Given an unsorted array of integers, find first two numbers in the array that equal a given sum.

View Answers (6)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 4+ weeks)

Submitted my resume and cover letter online. Contacted by the recruiter a month later and had most of the communications via emails (for interview arrangements) and had 2 phone interviews.

Interview Questions

questions about tree and hash table

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

After a brief phone screen consisting of a resume walk down, had two back to back 1 hour technical phone screen interviews. Phone screen interviews all consisted of technical programming challenges. Interviewers had me code into a shared google doc and explain my solutions as I went. Interviewers were helpful and provided clarification when needed, and even a few hints.

Interview Questions

Given a base 10 number, print the hexidecimal (base 16) representation of that number.

View Answers (2)

Given a list of generic items, describe/code the approach would you take to finding the most common item.

Given a list of integers of at least length 7, print the average of each consecutive 7 number long subsequence (sliding window).

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2010 in Seattle, WA (took 5 days)

I am not a CS major. They asked one question about communication through the internet. Then several simple algorithm questions.

Interview Questions

What problem you may run into if you want to send one file from one place to another through the internet.

Other Details

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