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Google Software Engineer In Test Interview Questions & Reviews

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Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 10 ratings

3.7

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 10 ratings

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Neutral	40%
Negative	20%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 4+ weeks)

I had one phone interview and then an on-site interview for this position. The phone interview was a 45 minute technical interview including programming over Google Docs, and the onsite consisted for five 45-minute technical interviews (involving programming on the dry erase board), plus lunch. The interview is fairly challenging, so I would recommend reviewing any websites and materials that Google suggest you review, as well as maybe a combination of data structures, algorithms, and programming interview books.

I think it was difficult for me to gauge my performance in these interviews, as I got through the problems ok (with some hints from the interviewers), and the interviewers generally seem to be helpful to you. I did not receive an offer though. The interviewers were all polite, friendly, and helpful, and they all seem generally happy with the work culture at the company.

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?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 (took 5+ weeks)

After few (meaningless) HR phone calls, a tech phone interview was scheduled. 45 min with white board coding, usually on 2-3 problems. These could be as easy as BST recursion, or as bad as skip list implementation/application. Remember your algorithms, keeping talking(it's extremely important over the phone especially the other person doesn't know if you're frowning or just thinking).
Once passed phone interview, an onsite was scheduled in around a week or so. Starting with meeting a HR to brief you about the day, you'll meet 4-5 engineers for 1:1 technical grilling. Other people said enough about google onsites, and especially I didn't make, I'd just suggest you be relaxed, trust your skills and keep communication flowing with interviewers.

Interview Questions

Way back years ago, I was asked to implement the NP-hard 3-set algorithm on the spot.

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?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 (took 2 weeks)

The recruiter was great at planning the interviews. The first two interviewers asked some pretty standard questions, but sounded dull and uninterested in their product. The third interviewer had a completely insipid attitude, was discouraging during interview questions, and offered very little conversation. He had a very condescending attitude and, though I won't go into the details, did a poor job of selling the company. I did not make it past the third round, but even if I did, the lack of enthusiasm in these three interviews would have deterred me from joining.

Interview Questions

How do you find the cube root of a number?

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 days)

Applied online and got a call for phone screen for 45min.

Interview Questions

Given a list of integer e.g. (1,2,4,5,6,7,8...)
Find a pair with a given sum.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I Applied Online 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 Mar 2010 (took a day)

Had a HR question me on my background. No Tech question. They probably looked at my résumé and decided I wasn't good enough fo rthe position.

Interview Questions

How do you run a test of 1 million sample data?

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jul 2009 in Hyderabad (India) (took 5 days)

I had an written test first. They shortlisted 11 people from the written test. After that I had 2 rounds of Panel Interview .. They eliminated some people for each round .after the end of 2 rounds only 2 people were shortlisted for 3 rd. 3 rd and 4 th round were 1:1 interview.

Interview Questions

Assume a matrix of integers they are sorted in boh row and column vice .. how do u find a given number from the matrix in a optimal way?

View Answers (7)

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

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

I interviewed for a Software Engineer in Test role at Google in Jan 2010 when I had two hour long phone interview in the same day. The precursor to this was that I was referred by someone I knew in the company, I then had a quick 20 minute talk with an HR person who set up my 2 interviews.

The first interview was with a member of the Test team for Chrome. We started with going through my background, why I applied for the role and then moved onto some of what would be considered technical questions. The first was a testing question, he asked me what approach I would take to Test that Google Chrome actually works. We went through that for about 15-20 minutes when I was asked a logic/programming question. The setup was that I was a parking attendant in a lot that only ever had one open spot, and I wanted to move the cars into a new arrangement (from their original). Create a program that will print out instructions on how to move the cars most efficiently.

The problem is not that difficult, what you have to do is find the empty spot, then look in the desired arrangement for what car should be in that spot, and move that car there. Repeat until complete.

The second phone interview was much more heavily focuses on Data Structures, there was very few questions on my background, we got into the coding portion right away. With this interview I found that the interviewer was very unclear in what she desired, and it did not seem like it was on purpose (eg, she was not being intentionally vague), and we honestly just did not click.

Based on the second interview my expectations were low. A week after the interviews I got a call from the HR person associated with me and she said that at this time they were not interested in me. I asked for more feedback, and she was unable to offer any. This is a large annoyance of mine because I really am looking to improve myself, and without feedback that is difficult to do. In this case though I am almost certain that my experience with data structures was my downfall.

My advice, if you are interviewing for a position at Google, make sure you know those data structures through and through, because that seems to be what they care about.

Interview Questions

You are a parking lot attendant in a lot that has one open spot, and you want to move the cars from their original positions into a new arrangement. Create a program that will print out instructions on how to move the cars most efficiently.

View Answers (7)

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral 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 Mar 2008 in Kirkland, WA (took a day)

Background
I had a screening interview with Google, and then they invited me over to their Kirkland, WA office to do an 'interview loop' there.

Interview #1
After filling out a bit of paperwork, interviewer came and got me, and took me to his office. And so began the day. We chatted for about 20 seconds, and then he gave me a programming problem. The problem was: "Write the 'grow' function for a C++ vector class". Easy enough.
The second problem he gave me was a bit more difficult: Reverse a linked list. It took me about 15-20 minutes to come up with the solution and code it. But, I learned one important 'trick' to these types of interview questions. When you figure out an algorithm that takes a duplicate data structure, you can usually 'massage' the given data structure to get the solution you want.

Interview #2 - Mark The Lunch Interview
So, I got a free lunch at the Google cafeteria... but, that didn't mean I wasn't getting more interviewing questions. During lunch, I got the question: "How would you determine if someone has won a game of tic-tac-toe on a board of any size?". This really took me longer than it should have to figure out. The crazy thing is... no matter how big the board is, the solution is constant time.
Then, he gave me a pretty cool question: "The government wants cars to keep track of whether or not they are speeding. The unit to determine this is already able to determine the speed of the vechicle, how would you finish it". So, I spent some time rolling some ideas around in my head. Determined it wasn't feasible to 'read' speed limit signs reliably from a car. Then I thought if the car had a Mapquest-esque database of speed limits, and a GPS to report coordinates to the unit, you could determine if the car was speeding. And, the database could be updated once per year when you get your emissions checked (I know not everyone has to have their emissioned check... but its a good idea).
Then we went back to Mark's office, and the coding questions started. First, I had to write a binary search for a sorted array. I wrote it recursively, because thats the way I learned it. Then he had me write it iteratively... which wasn't too hard either.
Now, you've got an array of size 10^6, with the numbers 0 through (10^6)-1. The array has duplicate entries, so there will me missing numbers. Write a function to find one of the missing numbers. The solution should be in linear time.
Mark was a cool guy, and he'd be fun to work with.

Interview #3
Mark and I actually talked for quite a while about my senior design project. Then, he asked me to code for him (suprise!). Given a sorted array of integers, write a function to remove any duplicates (e.g. 1,2,3,3,3,4,4,5 would go to 1,2,3,4,5). I came up with a solution to this, but it wasn't that good... so we talked about a way to make it better. This was my 'worst' interview... but even this one wasn't too bad.

Interview #4
The first one he had me do was: write a function to find the 2 biggest numbers in an array, and return the sum. Then he had me write a function to find the K biggest elements in the array, and return the sum. Both in linear time. There were some good optimizations for this one too.
Then, I had to write a function the removed space from a given array of characters. I told him about the solution that me and Ryan had discussed and how it applied to this problem. Then we talked about a few of the finer points of this problem. I didn't end up having to write any code for that problem, which was good... because my shoulder was getting sore from writing on whiteboards all day (seriously... it still hurts).

Wrap-up with Recruiter - Katy
Then I went and talked with the recruiter about how the day went, yadda yadda. She told me I'd hear back in 5-7 business days.

I spent lots of mental energy coming up with the solutions to those problems... so, I'm not to just divuldge them (plus, I don't want someone to 'beat' my work :)

It was a long day. I got there at about 11AM to fill out some paperwork. I left after my talk with Katy at 4:30PM. It was 5.5 hours of almost pure 'testing'. It was F-U-N though. I learned a few new algorithms, and discovered a few too. It was also D-R-A-I-N-I-N-G... thats a long time to be constantly getting questions and pressure to come up with better solutions.

Interview Questions

How would you determine if someone has won a game of tic-tac-toe on a board of any size?

View Answers (11)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Sep 2008 in Zurich (Switzerland) (took a day)

The interviews were pretty informal and laid-back. The company already knew my work, so the process was rather short - only a couple of interviewers. I was asked to solve a problem on the whiteboard, my solution was discussed and we then discussed ways of improving it. Then another (and much more complex) problem was presented, and I had to say how I'd approach it - no actual coding, just discussion.
They say that "anything on your CV is fair game" and they mean it - be prepared, and don't exaggerate your claims.
The recruiter was also very helpful throughout the whole process, and very open to answering my questions and letting me know what was going on.

Interview Questions

You have a database with employees and their hierarquies. Construct an SQL statement to associate each employee with their supervisor.

View Answers (3)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2007 in Mountain View, CA (took 3 weeks)

Application online through Google's main job application page. I was contacted by a Google recruiter who gave me an initial phone interview and series of questions to assess my skills and experience in different areas. The first call took about 20 minutes. She then worked on my behalf to set up interviews with engineers in the departments which were the closest fit for my experience and skill set.

The first technical interview was with an engineer in team I was applying for. It consisted mainly of thinking puzzles which I was expected to work out a solution for in real time. The emphasis is on demonstrating critical thinking skills and problem solving, not necessarily getting the correct answer.

An interview for a different department was conducted online through Google Docs where I was asked to write code in response to a puzzle question. After completed I was asked to explain it's function and explain ways I could improve the efficiency.