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Updated Feb 3, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 20 ratings

3.2

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 20 ratings

Positive	40%
Neutral	25%
Negative	35%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 4+ weeks)

I got the response from Google one week after I submitted an online application. Then I scheduled two one-hour phone interviews. I did not do well in the phone interviews. Anyhow, I got the onsite and flew to Seattle. The google Seattle office is so so small. I wanted to work at the headquarter. But I applied at a wrong time. No opening at the headquarter then. I so regret that.

Interview Questions

How do you think about dealing with the work relationship with your colleagues?

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Apr 2011 in Montreal, QC (Canada) (took a day)

This position was advertised to university students; applications were handled through the school. The interview itself took place on campus, and consisted of only one interviewer.

I was asked a few basic questions about Java (difference between abstract classes and interfaces, whether multiple inheritance is possible, why might the designers of Java not have allowed multiple inheritance). I got the sense that the interviewer felt good about my Java skills early on, and skipped over to the next part of the interview.

Next, I was asked to write a Java program that reverses a 2D bitmap (i.e. 2D integer array) that is represented as a 1D array. I felt that I got off to a good start, but eventually started to verify by trial and error that I was indexing the 1D array correctly in my algorithm. The interviewer commented (respectfully) that perhaps I should try to think it through logically, rather than trying to verify my formula through trial and error. He helped me move along, and wrote down my code into his notebook when I was done (I assume, to look at it more closely later on).

I was asked one final question: if you have a network of computers, and a massive file (e.g. tens of gigabytes) on one of the machines, how would you efficiently copy the file to all of the machines on the network. I asked him what the bottleneck is and he said that it is the network cards on the machines. I suggested a bittorrent-style architecture in which one machine starts to copy the part of the file that it has already received, before having the entire file. He asked me what the time complexity was of this solution and I told him that it would be linear with regards to the size of the file.

He then asked me if I had any questions and was good about providing me with detailed answers. Other than tripping over the 2D bitmap question a bit, I felt that the interview went well. He told me that I would likely hear back from them within two weeks, but I never did. I assumed that this was due to my school acting as the intermediary, but upon contacting the school weeks later, they said that they were never contacted.

Interview Questions

What is the difference between an interface an an abstract class in Java?

View Answers (1)

Write a Java program that takes a 2D bitmap (represented as a 1D array of integers), and reverses it about its vertical axis.

View Answers (1)

If you have a network of computers and one of the computers has a massive file (e.g. tens of gigabytes), how would you copy the file to all of the other nodes in the network?

View Answers (1)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

The interview process with Google is robust and aimed at hiring the best brains in Computer Science, though it is a bit taxing on the applicant.

I had to first go through a phone screening round. I was asked questions about basic CS stuff. Difference between Hash Tables and Binary Search Trees, why balancing a tree is important. Then 2 algorithmic questions were asked which I was supposed to code on a shared web document. The first one was to find out number of unique elements in an array. Second one, umm, I don't remember, sorry. There was also a question on designing a file sharing mechanism.

The on site interviews were on a more intense level. I had 5 one-on-one interviews each lasting close to 1 hour.

Overall, even though I didn't get through, the experience was positive as it underscored areas I needed to look into. As with all good CS companies, Google looks for robustness of code, simplicity of solutions and of course the efficiency.

Interview Questions

Questions in first round:
Write a method to pretty print a binary tree. Don't make any assumptions, i.e. the tree could be highly unbalanced.

Given a dictionary segment a piece of un-spaced text to find meaningful words. e.g "makemytrip"->make my trip

Answer Question

2nd Round:
A design question (don't remember) and another question on adversarial mini-max search

3rd Round:
Write a method to find the next ancestor of a node in a Binary Search Tree.
Write a recursive function to convert Binary Code of a number into its equivalent Gray's code and the other way round.

4th round:
Given two sorted arrays, find the kth minimum element of both.
Given a set of intervals, find the interval which has the maximum number of intersections.

5th round:
This one was focused on previous projects and experience and how good I was at what I had been doing.

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Beijing, Beijing (China) (took 2 weeks)

3 times interview. two times technology interview and one time personel interview.

Interview Questions

why do you want to choose Google?

Answer Question

where is your edge?

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Presentation, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test, a Personality Test and a Background Check.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

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

Find the combination of strings.
Discuss process and threads.
Discuss projects.

Interview Questions

Cominations of strings.

View Answers (1)

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 Nov 2011 (took a day)

Two interviewers. Each 45 minutes. We talked through phone and wrote anything you want through google doc. The first one asked me about C++. Class, subclass, virtual function ,static. The second one gave a case problem and let me design an algorithm. He expected me using hash table. The case is that given a set of telephone numbers , how do you group them.

Interview Questions

Why this industry?

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2009 in Palo Alto, CA (took 2 days)

My experience was similiar to others that I had heard about. Started with an initial telephone interview, and after a while (about 2 weeks) and invitation for an in-person interview. I thought the proces was fairly standard, but that may be explained by hearing from others who had been intervied before. I came back on the next day for follow up intervies, but did not reveive an offer.

Interview Questions

Why are manhole covers round?

View Answers (2)

Other Details

I applied In-Person.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 8 weeks)

Started with one telephonic interview. Took a month to get back to me with results of phone interview. Next was onsite interview with 4 1:1's. It went how it went , interviewers were busy scribbling down whatever I was saying or writing on board (they said they have to report this to senior management / hiring committe - this was pretty distracting, Esp when they jotted down the code as I wrote on the board and made changes. I didnt want them to jot down sth wrong and make a bad decision. Recruiter then told me they dont need references unless they are in the last stages of making decisions. They did ask for my references a week after my onsite and insisted that I provide my professional references. This made things hard for me as my last job was 4 years ago and in a different country. (i did my masters after that and now work at this company for 2 yrs) I could only get my colleagues from previous company to talk. (they preferred someone who evaluated me but not my professors). I did not get hired.

Interview Questions

binary tree successor

Answer Question

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?

1.0

Very Easy Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2011 in Montreal, QC (Canada) (took 4+ weeks)

1) Very easy interview questions compared to what other large American companies I worked for in the past asked.
2) The Montreal interviewer was very arrogant and kept making basic big O analysis errors. I just went along with his "reasoning".
3) I would not work there if this represent the quality and attitude of the staff.
4) A friend of mine worked in the Waterloo office after completing his PhD in computer science. He did not find the job stimulating and left the company a year later.
5) I was told the Google Montreal office only hires referrals made by Google Montreal employees. I was referred by a London employee. Apparently that does not qualify.
6) I'm not convinced this office will grow beyond 30 employees (or 30 people anyone would want to work with).

Interview Questions

1) Code and analyse the function findMaximums().
2) Use a sorted data structure (a binary tree).
3) std::vector<int> findMaximums(int* Data, int N, int K) where
4) Data is an array of int's.
5) N is the size of the array Data.
6) K is the number of element from Data you want to compare and maximize.
7) The vector you return is the list of these "local maximums".

View Answers (2)

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2009 in Dublin, County Dublin (Ireland) (took 1+ week)

The interview process consisted of an email response, a programming/technical skills test, and a telephone interview.

1. Email response: they sent me a number of questions and I drafted an email response- describing myself, my interests, future directions, special projects, etc.
2. Programming test: they sent me a programming question (to code/solve) and I had 1-hour to write code and send back my response
3. Telephone interview: they asked me a series of technical questions, the first question was strange in that- now looking back- it was more of an "are you an encylopedia" question rather than a question that could actually be answered. This question really caught me off guard and I unfortunately let it send me down a shame spiral for the the rest of the interview.

Overall it was a positive experience. I learned about myself: it is important to take perceived failure (failure to answer the impossible questions) in stride and stay focused.