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Updated May 10, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 33 ratings

3.4

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 33 ratings

Positive	45%
Neutral	52%
Negative	3%

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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 in Los Angeles, CA (took 2 days)

I dropped my resume at university career fair, one week later I got the chance for the on-campus interviews, which consist of two 45 minutes back-to-back interviews. Unfortunately, on the day before the on-campus interview, they told me that one of the interviewers will leave earlier so that only one back-to-back interview is available and the other will be changed to phone interview. I did well for the on-campus interview but not so good for the phone interview. Anyway, the interview process is supposed to be happy but turned to be not so good.

Interview Questions

For a given maze, how to write a function to check if there's a way rom the top-left grid to bottom-right grid with obstacles in the middle.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 in Dublin, County Dublin (Ireland) (took 4 months)

I have been asked of sending my CV by an employee, and I sent it in July 2010. In September a recruiter contacted me back and we started the interview process.

The process itself is long and sometimes I had to wait 2-3 weeks between each interview and its outcome.

They assign you a recruiter and she follows all the phases of the process, quickly answering to your questions and keeping you updated. The interviewers are very competent and friendly, if you don't know something they tend to help you, because they need to know how you reason and what is your background.

The people seem overall excellent. The process is a bit lengthy but not unbearable.

Interview Questions

Compute all the intersections of two sets of segments in a line.

View Answers (2)

Suppose you have a set objects, identified by a unique name. How do you store them so that you can retrieve them easily?

View Answers (1)

Given a set of cities, each with a given population, select randomly a city with a probability that is proportional to the population.

View Answers (2)

How do you process a set of log files if you don't have enough memory to do it?

View Answers (1)

What is the output of the Linux uptime command? What is the meaning of load average? How is the load average affected by SMP?

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

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

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

I discussed my interests and my short-term plan for the future with the recruiter. She was very easy to talk to and she seemed very interested in helping me get an internship at Google.

Interview Questions

What do you plan to do after college?

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2010 (took 4+ weeks)

Interview process consisted of three phone interviews, each with a different engineer.
All the questions were engineering questions, ie no cultural fit or other types of questions like this.
I had to choose 3 areas of interest, and submit a CV. Based on that, and your interview performance, Google decided whether you are a "good fit" for their intern program.

Interview Questions

Perform binary search on a sorted array, of which you don't know the size.

View Answers (2)

Implement a fast exponentiation function

View Answers (4)

You are climbing a stair case. Each time you can either make 1 step or 2 steps. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase ?

View Answers (7)

How would you go about testing a distributed system such as Gmail, before releasing it to the public. How would you simulate realistic server load ?

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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 Apr 2009 (took a day)

Submit resume online. Several months later, I was phone interviewed by 2 software engineerer.
First interview consists of the overview of my resume and project expericence. Then 2 technical questions
are asked. No programming on google doc.
Second interview consists of 1 programming problem on google doc.

Interview Questions

Find the integer pairs in an integer array, so that they sum up to a specific number n.

View Answers (5)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2010 (took a day)

I gave my resume to recruiter from Google I met at the Europython 2010 conference. Then he contacted me by mail to ask me what I like to do, and where I would like to work, and when I would be free for a phone interview.

During the interview, I was asking to provide some gode on a google doc, and also reply on the fly to some technical question.

Interview Questions

Give the sizeof of the following struct :

struct{
char a,b;
int c;
}

View Answers (3)

Write a C procedure to reverse a string in-place.

View Answers (4)

Someone can go up on stairs from one or two steps, how many different there is to go up on a stairs with n steps.

View Answers (5)

What are the argument of the main function in C.

View Answers (2)

How to delete the file "-f" with rm.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter 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 Oct 2009 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

I applied for the position online. After they reviewed my application, I was ask about my availability for phone interviews. The interviews were done during the same day with very nice software engineers. I heard back in about 2-3 weeks about my offer. The recruiter kept the process very transparent and kept me updated along the way.

Interview Questions

Reverse the word order in a string.

View Answers (2)

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 Mar 2010 (took 4 weeks)

I had two technical interviews over phone. The first interviewer asked me to solve two graph related problems, and the second one asked me about finding the intersection of two lists of integers, leading on to the case where the lists are too big to fit into the memory. I think I gave correct solutions, but botched on asymptotic running time of one of the graph problems.

Interview Questions

There is a museum organized as NxN room. Some rooms are locked and inaccessible. Other rooms are open and some rooms have guards. Guards can only move north, south, east and west, only through open rooms and only within the museum. For each room, find the shortest distance to a guard. What is the time complexity of your algorithm?

View Answers (1)

There is an NxM grid containing a robot at (1, 1) and a destination at (N, M). Robot can move only up or right. Some locations can have obstacles. Find the number of unique paths from (1, 1) to (N, M). What is the time complexity of your algorithm?

View Answers (7)

You are given two sets of integers, sizes M and N with M < N. Perform inner equal join on these two sets (i.e., find intersection of the two lists). How to perform it if both the lists are in files and the available memory is of size K < M < N.

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2010 (took 4+ weeks)

I submitted my resume online, I got an email saying they would be interested in interviewing me. They scheduled two 45 minute interviews over a two hour period

We were to use the phone and Writely (aka Google Docs) Oddly enough they referred to it as Writely.

The interviewers were both engineers, they called me but Writely did not work so we spend 10 minutes during each interview trying to get it to work. They were both nice about it not working, no snide comments etc. We ended up using Google Talk, I would post my code and she her comments and/or questions.

They asked about my research, then a few softballs followed by one or two questions. The second interviewer also explained the Google interviewing process, and what I should expect next. The questions were tricky, and I was not feeling confident afterwards.

A few weeks later, I sent the recruiter an email asking for an update then she responded with another phone interview this time for a specific position, with a hiring manager (host).

He called me, he described his project, which I had looked up when the recruiter told me the group. He also described the position, which I was a bit bleh about - he noticed that. We asked about my background then did a bit of role play - how would you do X, etc.

I emailed the recruiter a synopsis of the interview as she had asked. A few weeks later, she said she was still trying to find me a good host at Google.

Interview Questions

Build Windows Minesweeper. Data structure, method to check state etc.

Answer Question

Find a loop in a linked list. How long is the loop?

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2009 in Sydney (Australia) (took 2 weeks)

At first I received a phone interview to discuss what sort of areas of software development I was interested in, a little bit about my background, why I thought I would be a good fit for Google and also received a few questions regarding some common programming questions.

This was then followed by a one on one phone interview with an Engineer from Google who asked me some general problem solving questions, such as how to implement a queue simply using two stacks and how to implement a highly efficient queue using two stacks and another question about calculating the max execution time of a program that had to fit into a certain size of memory on an embedded device.