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Google Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Updated Jan 27, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 23 ratings

4.2

“Very Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 23 ratings

Positive	43%
Neutral	35%
Negative	22%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Chicago, IL (took 4 weeks)

The interview started with a non-technical phone interview with a recruiter -- easy, standard stuff. A week later was a technical phone screen. We had a shared Google Doc and I had to implement a HashMap. Up until now, things were ok.

I had some issues with how the in-person reviews were run. Most of the questions were reasonable, but the interviewers clearly lacked any sort of experience in running an interview.

Interview Questions

Write an algorithm for integer multiplication

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 (took 3 months)

There was an initial phone screen to cover fit and possible openings. This was cultural and focused on achievements as well as communication skills. Then there was a long gap to schedule an in person technical round. This consisted of a few engineers and was very technical. There was no strong communication of expectations of the role and the title and many groups spoke. Another round of interviews happened two months later and it was the same process with vague communication of possible roles.

Interview Questions

How do you design a high-write, high-read database.

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Aug 2011 (took a day)

Be prepared to dust off college books and try to remember every algorithms/codes that your learned in the past years. Phone interview is a hit/miss on one technical question. As for onsite, each interviewers might have a complete 180 degree focus from others. It is difficult for those who have worked on a specific field for a long time unless they have plenty of time to review.

Interview Questions

AVL tree

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 in San Jose, CA (took 2 weeks)

Questions related to finding medians on millions of lines of data distributed across various servers.

Interview Questions

find the median of million rows in each of the 1000 servers.

Answer Question

what is the best way to sort millions of records

View Answers (2)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Aug 2011 (took 3 days)

there are phone interviews and on site interviews.
for on site, they paid for plane, hotel and food expenses. the recruitier and five skilled software engineers interviewed me each a time, asking software design and development questions. that was a tiresome but very fun and enriching experience

Interview Questions

theory of NP problems

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2010 (took 3 days)

They send you a link to online Google docs- and ask you to code , so that they can look at what you are doing. I had mentioned the interviewer that I am not comfortable with low level programming and he went with semaphores and spin locks- which was a little irksome as I told him not to.

Maybe he was trying to figure out my thinking process in an unknown terrain.

Interview Questions

Write a semaphore with spin-lock capability

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2010 in Pittsburgh, PA (took a day)

Get the interview for SDE intern, not an phone but an on-site interview.
I think it's mainly because I'm living close to their office.

The interviewers are nice, but they can't move forward on me.
Seems they have one year cool down if you've failed an on-site, I've try to apply again, but no response.

Interview Questions

How would you desgin facebook, use the data struct to show the social network and find out the people that close to you but your relation are stranger (white board coding)

Answer Question

We have m slots for ads and n ads, each ads will have different revenue on differnet slot, design an algorithm to find out the best fit (find m ads in n ads and order them so that they can make max money, white board coding) .

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

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

Interviewed with five senior level engineers and a director level manager. Most of them asked senior level questions, i.e. design questions. One asked junior algorithms. Be careful about Google policy, if one interviewer said something bad about you, it's hard to you to get an offer, even though all others want you badly. Take simple algorithm questions seriously, explain to the interviewer like you are tutoring him, otherwise he may think you are missing some key points.

Interview Questions

Design a system to analyze huge log files

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

View Comments (1)

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 weeks)

Got a Linkedin message from a recruiter that followed with one phone interview.
Then got invited to an interview on site.
Was interview by 5-6 engineers about various subjects matching the rating I gave in an e-mail from HR.

Interview was very long and exhausting, each engineer has different demands and you kind of have to figure them out and work them, didnt work for me!

Interview Questions

Write pseudo code for a Binary Search tree

View Answers (2)

Find the least common root for 2 numbers in a BST

View Answers (5)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Declined Offer

Interviewed Aug 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took 4 weeks)

After I passed phone interview I had 6 on site interviews in 2 days. 45 minutes each. My former co-workers described all the favorite topics. It is mostly questions on Algorithms, Data Structures. Coding is an integral part of an interview at Google. Be ready to write code on whiteboard. A few questions were rather difficult.