Google Software Development Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Feb 5, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 19 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 19 ratings
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| 11–19 of 19 Google Interviews | Sort by |
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Jun 22, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2010 (took 2 weeks)
I was referred by a friend. I first talked to a recruiter who asked me about my background, how much I time I spent writing code, etc.
I then had a technical phone interview in which the interviewer asked me why one should have virtual destructors. I eventually fumbled through it (but could have done better had I studied my Effective C++ book!).
After that I had to write a program that drew a horizontal line in a 2D raster, given that the raster was a bit array.
Interview Questions
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?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted May 31, 2010 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Mar 2009 (took 3 days)
I was contacted by the recruiter, asked me for a resume. I sent my resume. 1 week later, the recruiter called me and asked me if I like to have a phone interview. it was scheduled for the nest day. it lasted for about 1 hour. questions included what I wanted to do, it was fun, but I did not get an offer,
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Apr 25, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Apr 2010 (took a day)
I applied online and get scheduled a phone interview consisted of 2 sessions of 45 mins each. The first interviewer is kind of tough and speaks really fast. She asked me to introduce myself and then ask me about the datastructures I am familiar with. Then she asked the time complexity analysis about BST and hashtables and asked me to code a program to check if a binary tree is the subtree of another.
The second interviewer goes straightly into technical questions and ask me to write a program to find the largest possible value of an integer array with limited number of swaps in the neighboring elements. Eg. an array of 1,2,3,4, the max value with 1 swap is 2,1,3,4, and with 2 swaps is 3,1,2,4. After that he ask me how to find the perfect numbers,which can be represented as a ^ m + b ^ n (a, b >= 1, m, n >= 2), between 1 and 1M. I was kinder of nervous coz this is my first interview with such a tough company and really didnt do well though the questions don't seem to be that hard. lol
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Mar 30, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Mar 2010 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 weeks)
Sent a mail to Google recruiter who was prompt to call me. After initial screening, she setup a phone screen with someone in engineering team. At the last moment, the person who was supposed to interview was not available and someone else called me.
Questions were fairly straight forward.
What happens when you type www.google.com in your browser?
What are the things part of HTTP request?
How are headers and body seperated in a HTTP request?
Given a URL which has url-encoded name-values and a variable, return the value for it.
Now modify the function to handle when the name appears multiple times.
Interview Questions
Now modify the function to handle when the name appears multiple times.
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Mar 8, 2010
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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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
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Mar 8, 2010 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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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
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Nov 6, 2009
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Aug 2009 (took 2 weeks)
Google sure knows how to treat their interview candidates well. I went for an on-site interview in their beautiful new Kirkland office. They offered me fresh brewed coffee in the morning and, of course, invited me to partake in a gourmet lunch.
Interviewers are well-prepared and all interviews seem to follow a similar format. I had four interviews, each lasting one hour. Each round starts with a few short answer questions before diving into coding. I studied a number of interview question sites beforehand but was still quite surprised when I actually GOT one of the questions from there. So it partially paid off.
Best advice is as others say, know your data structures and algorithms. I didn't get any high level design questions. As soon as you get the problem statement, think out loud! No matter how stupid it sounds, silence is even worse. It's fine to come up with a really inefficient solution to start. The interviewer will usually drop hints if there is a better way. Finally, know how to figure out your big O()
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Oct 14, 2009 — 0 of 2 people found this helpful
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jul 2009 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 months)
I spoke with two HR people, the first was local but didn't have any positions that fit me. She forwarded me on to an HR staffer at the Mountain View office which led into a phone interview with an engineer who was working on Chrome and O3D. It was pretty exciting to get to talk to engineers who are working on all these cool projects.
I guess I passed the phone interview because the next step was them flying me to Mountain View for an on-site interview. I didn't really blow them out of the water because I was rusty on a lot of stuff, so I heard back a week later with a report on where my weaknesses were, which was very helpful.
The HR staff were both very helpful, and the engineers that I interviewed with were more or less nice folk, some more friendly than others. None were hostile or intimidating. I really enjoyed getting to work through problems with real Google engineers.
Interview Questions
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.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer at Google
Posted Jul 12, 2009
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jun 2009 in Mountain View, CA (took 4+ weeks)
A recruiter has been in contact with me for half a year, until I'm finally ready to apply. Then, they gave me a phone interview, 2-3 weeks later, followed by another phone interview. I'm going for an onsite interview in a few days.
Phone interview 1:
1. What is virtual function?
2. What is the benefit of inherent?
3. What is the advantage of interface in java?
4. Write a program to reverse a linked list.
5. Write a program to find the intersection of two sets and test your program.
Phone interview 2:
1. How to get k random samples in a large file of query key words?
hints: partition the files into n trunks. Load the trunk into main memory.
2. How to design a search engine? If each document contains a set of keywords, and is associated with a numeric attribute, how to build indices?
hints: use inverted list + B+tree.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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