Post a Salary or Review

Advanced

Google Interview Questions & Reviews in Seattle, WA Area

Post an Interview

Web: www.google.com | HQ: Mountain View, CA

Connections

Updated May 5, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
Ratings are reflective of location and job title.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 31 ratings

3.6

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 31 ratings

Positive	23%
Neutral	48%
Negative	29%

Google has 313,223 connections on Glassdoor

See Who You Know

Hide Filters

21–30 of 31 Google Interviews

Sort by

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Apr 2010 in Kirkland, WA (took 4+ weeks)

They contacted me quickly after submitting resume.
One phone interview plus two trips out. First trip had 5 hour-long interviews
with engineers. Second trip had two. All involved coding problems.

Hard interview process, but fair. My only real complaint is I had to fly out two times.
Better if I could've done it in one trip, perhaps a two day interview.

Interview Questions

Find shortest substring in a string that contains all of a set of characters.

View Answers (5)

Other Details

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

More Google Software Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2009 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

I interviewed for a network architect position, stating clearly at the beginning of the interview that I was involved in application and TCP level performance analysis. However, the interviewer kept questing me about layer 2 material because that's what he knew. It was clearly not the right role for me, but I decided not to continue the interview process after that.

Other Details

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

More Google Engineering Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2010 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

I had 1 technical screen with a Sr developer at Google. First 30 minutes were discussing software development methodologies, which went well. Second half was spent doing technical design over the phone. Mainly it was a discussion of how to solve problems and what data structures I'd use. I didn't think the questions were very difficult, and I'm pretty sure my solutions were correct, but I guess I didn't do well enough because I was told I wasn't a fit.

Interview Questions

Describe an in-order binary search tree traversal.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

More Google Software Development Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2010 in Seattle, WA (took 1+ week)

Was great Phone interview, really liked the interviewer - In person interview was not very impressive. If only they could stress on what exactly they were looking in my skills vs. keep on agreeing with me with what I was talking that would be helpful.

Interview Questions

Really can not disclose any questions due to NDA. But a hint! Heap DataStructure is more important than most of us think of!

Answer Question

Other Details

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

More Google Software Development Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2008 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

I got a call to schedule a initial phone interview. It was scheduled in a week, but the questions they asked me was somewhat unanswerable under my knowledge. So I failed.
I want them to go little easy on the interview and try to get to know the candidate a bit more than just asking the whole bunch of difficult questions. I don't like that!!!

Interview Questions

Given a time-ordered log of user visits to web pages find the most common 3-page sequence

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

More Google Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2009 in Kirkland, WA (took 3 weeks)

I applied online and got a 45 minute phone interview. They asked me to fill out a questionnaire that consisted of scale of 1 - 10 expertise type questions for programming languages, areas of computer science, etc. The phone interviewer was asked me two questions and had to code on paper and read it out for the first question. Got an email the following week inviting me to kirkland for an on-site interview. Google reimburses any of your expenses during the on-site interview trip. Be sure to retain all receipts and send them scanned copies *within 15 days of your on-site interview.*

Interview Questions

I am playing a card game called 24. Cards ace to king are numbered 1 to 13. During a given round, I am provided four cards to play with from the shuffled pack. If the numbers from the four cards result in 24 then I win the round if I shout '24' first. How would you code a function for this?

View Answers (4)

A quad tree is used to represent a black/white image. If you are provided with two such image representations, write a function to create a third tree that represents the merged image. (Black overrides white, mixed; mixed overrides white)

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

More Google Software Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2009 in Seattle, WA (took 7 weeks)

Submitted resume online on 2009-09-15.

Received an email from someone in Staffing on 2009-10-07 asking for my location preferences, whether I am eligible to work in US, and actual date of intended graduation.

Received email from recruiter in Seattle/Kirkland office on 2009-10-08 to schedule a phone call. Told me we would talk about Google's recruiting process and focus on my background, education, and career interests to ensure that I speak with engineers who have a background and interests similar to my own.

Received call from recruiter as scheduled on 2009-10-14. We talked about Google's recruiting process, but not so much about my background, education, and career interests. I made sure she had my latest resume and I asked some questions about work-life balance in the Seattle office and also about Google's IP/non-compete policies. After the call I emailed times I would be available for two back-to-back technical phone interviews.

Received email from recruiter on 2009-10-15 confirming my scheduled time for two back-to-back technical phone interviews. Email included information about types of software engineer positions in the office and links to various Google pages (Labs, Code, lifeatgoogle Youtube channel) and Yegge's advice article. Also asked me to answer a few preliminary questions about myself to ensure I don't have any conflicts.

Received call from first Google engineer as scheduled on 2009-10-20. He described his work in Gmail on contact management and chat, mainly using C++. He asked me to describe a big project I've worked on and I told him about my thesis and its accompanying software implementation. He then asked some technical questions. I asked him about his work-life balance in that office and asked him if working there is anything like what you read about in Hamming's "You and Your Research."

After the interview I hung out for a couple hours waiting for the next phone call but it never came. I contacted the recruiter and she informed me that the second interviewer was unable to access his calendar and was unable to call. We rescheduled the second interview.

Received phone call from second engineer as rescheduled on 2009-10-23. He told me how he works on Google Maps and used to work on Talk at the Kirkland office. He asked me to talk about my thesis and I did, but for some reason I got really nervous talking about it this time. Voice was shaky for a while. After that he asked two technical questions. I asked him about his work-life balance at that office and what his most interesting use of Google's tremendous resources has been.

I was told by both engineers that I would hear from the recruiter soon so I waited for a week and a half or so. On 2009-11-04 I emailed the recruiter asking if we would be proceeding with the interview and later that evening I received a call from her stating the engineers enjoyed talking to me but we would not be moving forward.

The overall process was enjoyable, even when I was an anxious wreck. The technical interviews boosted my confidence, even though I stumbled on the easiest questions (postorder & basic C programming). The first engineer was far more polite & humble than the second one, but the second one was certainly civil enough. The recruiter was kind, easy to talk to, and obviously put effort into answering all of my tough questions about the Seattle/Kirkland offices & Google policies.

I learned that the Seattle/Kirkland offices tend to be a little more laid-back than the Mountain View office. Also, Google does make you sign a non-compete but it's not overly draconian. Many engineers run their own companies after hours and are even allowed to use AdWords and whatnot, provided they sign some agreements. I encourage you to go through the process for interview practice if nothing else.

Interview Questions

* Describe a balanced binary tree.
* When would you want to use a balanced tree rather than a hashmap?

View Answers (6)

* Describe preorder, inorder, postorder.

View Answers (1)

* Write a function, preferably in C or C++, to reverse a string.

View Answers (5)

* Describe the design of a most-recently-used list, such as the "Recent Files" menu in Microsoft Word. It has two public methods, getlist() and access(str), which retrieve the list and mark an item as accessed, respectively. The list has a maximum number of items it can hold, say 5, and it should not have duplicates. Describe the data structure used and the running time of both public methods.

View Answers (10)

* You have a data structure of integers, which can be negative, zero, or positive, and you need to support an API with two public methods, insert(int) and getmedian(). Describe a data structure you would use to support this API and describe the running time of the two methods.

* Imagine you're writing a function that takes an array of integers and an integer and it needs to return true if any pair in the array sum to the 2nd argument. The array can have negative numbers, zero, or positive numbers. Describe how you would design this function and what its running time would be. I ran through the trivial n^2 solution, then modified it to an nlogn and finally to a linear solution.

View Answers (7)

Other Details

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

More Google Software Engineer Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2007 in Seattle, WA (took 2+ weeks)

Interview was for a Product Manager position with Google at Kirkland. The two phone screens with people in Mountain View were interesting and exciting; you got the sense you were going to join a company with really smart, energetic people.

The 1:1 interview loop in Kirkland itself was very frustrating and disappointing. The frustration starts before the interview itself: they deliberately won't tell you who you are going to see, presumably because they don't want you to look up anyone on LinkedIn before you meet them. Since the Google office in Kirkland isn't all that big, you can actually figure out before hand who you are most likely to meet, based upon an hour or two of searching through LinkedIn. For a company that's allegedly all about making information accessible, this was the first warning sign that there was a serious disconnect between what they preach and what they practice.

There were the usual IQ-style questions, which don't really measure anything to do with intelligence, much less wisdom. These are the same questions that Amazon and Microsoft ask, so you can look them up on the Web beforehand as well without too much difficulty.

I met a number of people, who ranged from very smart to smart alecs. As anywhere else, the conversations with the really smart people were interesting, challenging in a fun way, and get you motivated to move through the interview process. The smart alecs are all from Microsoft, which is ironic: Google has been hiring a bunch of Microsofties who obviously can't cut their emotional ties to the mothership. All the discussion inevitably leads back to "aren't Microsoft products the greatest?", which is a weird discussion to have sitting inside a Google conference room.

Google has very little interest in your actual experience, which means if you have done a bunch of interesting things over a long period of time, you will be sorely disappointed by the interview process. The interview process is designed by, optimized for, and run by people who are <5 years out of college; if you don't fit that demographic, you are out of luck.

Interview Questions

Describe the operation of Layer 2 (Data Link Layer) of the 7-layer ISO stack in as much detail as possible.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

More Google Product Manager Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2009 in Kirkland, WA (took 1+ week)

1. I got a phone call from the recruiter who asked me a few questions about what I did in my present job.
2. Next the phone interview was scheduled for a week later.
    The phone interview consisted of three parts:
     a. Questions about my current job, stuff I worked on and projects I had participated in
     b. What is my favorite programming language and what is the most advanced feature of the language that I had used.
     c. Questions on multithreading, concurrency, locking. Simple question about race conditions, solutions to the usual concurrency problems. What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore. Which one would I use to protect access to an increment operation. (i.e. i++)
     d. A question on the 'Game of Nim' although it was worded differently.

Interview Questions

The Game of Nim worded diffently.

View Answers (11)

Concurrency, Multithreading

Answer Question

Other Details

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

More Google Software Development Engineer In Test Interviews

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2009 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

Had one phone interview, then met on-site with a small number of developers during a single day. All interviews were highly technical, focused on algorithm design, improvement, and ways to parallelize computation.

One interviewer was discourteous and impolite; when I misinterpreted a request, he was quite rude in pointing out that my answer was of a wholly different format than he was expecting. We did not get along, and as a result I did not fare terribly well. In every other interview, I believe I did very well or better.

Also, I really got along well with every other interviewer. In my limited experience, the reports of rude or dispirited Google employees are quite exaggerated.

I strongly suspect that a single mediocre report is enough to scuttle an interview, regardless of the others. My advice: Be prepared for people you don't get along with (as with any interview!), ask questions if there's even the hint of vagueness in your task, and have fun.

Interview Questions

NDA; don't want to comment. In general, be prepared to divide and conquer in every way possible. Also, dynamic programming would be a good subject of study.

Answer Question