Post a Salary or Review

Join Now or Sign In

Advanced

Google Software Engineer Intern Interview Questions & Reviews

Post an Interview

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

Connections

Updated Jan 29, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 25 ratings

3.3

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 25 ratings

Positive	44%
Neutral	52%
Negative	4%

See who your friends know who've worked at Google and could give you an inside look.

See who your friends know who've worked at Google and could help you prep for an interview.

Hide Filters

1–10 of 25 Google Interviews

Sort by

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took a day)

I was contacted by a recruiter for a phone screen after submitting my resume online. Like other posters have detailed, the phone screen consists of two back-to-back 45 minute interviews with Google employees. Interviewers were generally friendly. After passing the phone screen, the recruiter will send and email informing you that you will be matched with a group.

Interview Questions

Signed an NDA which I'll respect.

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 (took a day)

Initially fit screening that is basically a hello. Then a 2-part phone interview by two interviewers who were both very nice. However, just answering all the questions correctly does not mean you pass. Questions range from easy to medium-difficulty (started with graph theory, ended with Prims)

Interview Questions

if we had a list of n nodes, what are the maximum number of edges there can be for a directed acyclic graph?

View Answers (3)

basically code prims algorithm

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?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 (took a day)

Two back-to-back technical phone interviews
Give a problem and asked to write code to solve it
One is to count all winning "x o" games
The other is about checking time conflicts of events.(interval overlaps)

Interview Questions

design an algorithm to check if there are overlaps between a group of intervals

View Answers (1)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)

got an email for scheduling phone interviews.
done with two phone interviews

Interview Questions

Implement 'memcpy()' in C

Answer Question

Other Details

I Applied Online 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 Dec 2011 (took 1 week)

I got the interview by a friend's referral who is working at Google. It was two back to back 45 minutes interviews. The difficulty of the questions from the two interviews are similar. The interviewers are nice and they try to guide you to reach the answer for their questions.

Interview Questions

Code an application that creates a new thread and exposes a "ping()" method. Whenever ping() is called, the thread prints "Google rocks" once.

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?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 3 weeks)

Two back-to-back phone interviews writing code in Google doc. All simple coding questions, nothing else. Practice coding in google doc would be most helpful. Forget about the fancy algorithms...
Second interviewer was awful. He kept asking for a better solution but wouldn't give any hint. He was clearly not interested in the interview. Many times I asked a question and he was all silent; I had to ask again to get him to mumble something. It was as if he was watching a movie and I was bothering him.

Interview Questions

Eliminate replicates in a string

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?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 in Los Angeles, CA (took a day)

Asked typical CS-style interview questions, eg. reverse a linked list, print all permutations of a set of numbers, graph traversal, etc. Involved writing code on a whiteboard, followed by time/space analysis of solutions, can this algorithm be improved, etc. Also was asked other technical questions (explain what inheritance is, how does virtual memory work, etc) and had to talk about some of the points on my resume.

Interview Questions

typical CS interview questions, as listed above

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

2.0

Easy Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2009 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

My recruiter was very friendly. She was a little slow to respond to emails, but it wasn't too bad.

The technical interviews were fairly easy.

After the technical interview, there were project interviews. These were just to determine whether or not I would be interested in a given project; it was for my benefit more than theirs.

I ended up turning down their offer the first year to take an opportunity programming for public health in Cambodia, but they told me that I could go with them the following year without having to repeat the technical interview.

The next year, my recruiter connected me with a project in Google.org that I accepted.

Interview Questions

"Please define these random Object Oriented Programming terms"

Answer Question

Write this function (on a Google doc):
/*How many ways can you make change given the following denominations? ie, if numCentsToMake is 6 and denominations is [25, 10, 5, 1], then it should return 2: either a nickel and a penny or 6 pennies.*/
int numWaysToMakeChange(int numCentsToMake, int[] denominations)

View Answers (2)

how would you implement a web search engine?

View Answers (1)

how would you find the shortest path between two nodes in a social network?

View Answers (5)

you have a sorted array of real numbers drawn from the uniform distribution between 0 and 1. How can you quickly find a number in it?

This was the last question. They had me implement it on my own and send it back to them.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed May 2011 (took 2 days)

I received an email requesting a phone interview with 2 people at separate times but back to back. The email also contains two links to two google docs. This is where you type in your answers so the interviewer can see them. The types of questions they ask you is about algorithm and problem solving in general, but they go deeper and deeper once you have a solution. They'd go with the "what if now..." questions. Luckily I scored a third interview, and this was just like the other past two, over the phone and on a google doc. But I didn't get an offer after this.

Interview Questions

Given an array of numbers, there is one number that has a duplicate. How would you find the number?

View Answers (4)

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 (took a day)

Two back to back 45 minutes phone interviews. The interviewers were not native speakers, and it was a bit hard to understand their questions.
First interview consisted of general questions about complexity of different algorithms.
Second interview asked to solve two problems and code them in language of choice
First interviewer seemed happy with my answers. He even tried to help with hints.
Second interviewer was a bit grumpy and seemed disinterested in the interview. I solved both questions but did not give right complexity for the first problem. Also my code must have looked a bit primitive since I used plain C to code.
Did not get the offer but don't think the questions were out of reach. It was a reasonable experience.
Advice: get a lot of sleep before interview. I haven't and by the second interview I was already drained