Google Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I applied through a friend and was contacted by HR almost immediately. They scheduled me for on-site interviews at the Mountain View office without a technical phone screen.

I arrived early at Google's West Campus and found parking easily. It took a while to find a non-employee entrance to the building I was supposed to go to but I found it and signed in on a computer. The HR person then met me and took me to a conference room where I had two technical interviews, took a lunch break with an engineer who was not interviewing me, and had three additional technical interviews.

I can't discuss the specific questions but they were rather easy except one which was moderate. Four involved programming on the whiteboard and the last one covered system design. All of the interviewers were courteous and polite but two of the interviewers and the guy I had lunch with were especially warm and friendly.

The questions already posted on Glassdoor under Google are a bit harder than the questions I was asked but they are good preparation. I got one question which was listed here so I admitted that I knew it and gave the answer right away. I didn't get a follow-up question so that one was probably a free pass.

Most people asked questions in three phases. The first part is trivial. The second part is moderate and the third part is moderate or hard depending on your familiarity with the subject area (dynamic programming, recursion, hashtables, etc.)

I don't know whether I'll get an offer or not yet but since that's not an option on this form, I'll say that I did and accepted it.

Interview Details – Interned at Google the summer before. Loved the place. The team seemed to like me. Am graduating. Well, let's do interviews!

I contacted my intern recruiter asking for a full-time job opportunity, and s/he quickly referred me to the recruiter responsible for that. Since I was a former intern my phone screen was waived (had two 45-minute screens when applying for internship), and my former intern host was asked to provide a feedback. I was asked to do a job talk (as a PhD) followed by 4 rounds of interviews, 2 research and 2 engineering.

The job talk was 45-minutes followed by 15 minute questions. I was basically talking about what I did during the graduate school years, so it was quite pleasant and I was excited to see people interested in my work. After that it was a casual lunch with my intern host, so I devoted every minute enjoying the food.

The two research interviews were conducted by people familiar with the field, and had challenging questions on the overall understanding. I found it very exciting as both of us would get involved into discussion about the state-of-the-art. A little coding and math details were asked, but mainly about research ideas.

The two coding interviews were very standard - I did not get those very difficult questions like "implement sudoku in 30 mins" that someone allegedly encountered. The interviewer was constantly copying my whiteboard writings down, which created a little down time. I asked the interviewer and s/he said it was recently required and no worries. I guess if this could be disclosed by the recruiter earlier it would be better.

After the interviews the recruiter followed up promptly, with accurate estimates of when I would get updates. The hiring committee approved the application in a week, followed by the final offer a few days later.

Overall it is a nice experience and Google apparently provides great opportunities.

Negotiation Details – Gave the recruiter other offers to beat, the recruiter returned with reasonable numbers. Very simple and frank negotiations.

Interview Details – 2 rounds of phone interviews and then onsite

Interview Details – Although the recruiter contacted me quickly after my referrer posted my interview, she was unprofessional in that she failed to make phone calls as scheduled. This resulted in long waiting times and uncertainty about the situation.

There was a phone screen and 4.5 hour long in-person interview.

Interview Details – Applied on google website, 1 week later got an email from HR, and scheduled a phone interview in the following week.
The interviewer picked a place at their cafe, and a lot of noise out there. He apologized but all the loud noise around him stopped me several times and I don't feel he really care. Asked him to mute. Of course, it was not good.

Interview Details – I was contacted by Google, and a phone interview was setup. I was then contacted by an interviewer that was very soft spoken and had a very thick accent. I couldn't understand anything he was saying. I spent the majority of the first 3 questions trying to determine what he was saying and then we were out of time.

Interview Details – Got two emails from a Google recruiter based on academic institutions I had listed in my Google+ profiles.
I gave the recruiter a call and he called me back the same day. We had a 20 minute conversation about my current experience and about what I was looking for in a future job. He then said he would like to set up an interview in the next couple of weeks. He also requested I send him a copy of my resume.
8 days later I got an email from an interview coordinator. The interview was setup for 6 days from when this interview coordinator contacted me.
The interview was to be conducted over the phone and use a Google doc. I sent an email back to the interview coordinator asking if I could setup a Google hangout interview instead, since I don't have a headset that attaches to my phone, but I do have a webcam and headset that attach to my computer. (I watched an interview preparation video on the Google jobs page that suggested that I have a headset, and not to use speaker phone). The interview coordinator sent me instructions for the Google hangout interview; these instructions said the interviewer would contact me with the URL for the hangout.
I spent the weekend before my interview preparing, I practiced coding every sort and search function, some patterns that I haven't used in a while, etc., as I finished my undergrad 5 years ago, and expected the interview to be quite academic, based on feedback I've read on this site. Also reviewed OO principles, etc. I thought I would be in pretty good shape for the interview.
The time for my interview came around, and no email from the interviewer containing the Google hangout link. I figured I would give the interviewer 10 minutes before I took any action. 15 minutes later, still no email. So I emailed my recruiter. I got an email back from him almost immediately saying he would contact the interviewer. I then got an email from the interviewer with the hangout link. I clicked the link and it said I did not have permission to join the hangout. I also noticed the interviewer had not joined the hangout. I then got a call from the interviewer. He said that he hadn't ever used hangout before in an interview and so we should just do the interview over the phone, as that was his preference. I asked him to give me a minute to try to get the audio worked out on my end as his voice was muffled to the point I could barely understand him. Nothing I did fixed this, so I asked him if he was on speaker, he said "yes". I asked him if he could go off of speaker because I couldn't hear him. He did and then I could hear him perfectly, but both of us had to hold our phones, which was quite uncomfortable.
He continued by saying that he just had one question for me, and that it would probably take me the duration of the interview to complete. He pasted a java function into the Google doc (as I am most familiar with java). He explained briefly what the function was supposed to do, but said there were errors in the code and that it didn't currently accomplish the goal and that he wanted me to identify and fix the errors.
I won't specify what the code did, but I will specify that it dealt with a domain I was only vaguely familiar with. I started walking through the code with the interviewer to understand the flow of data through the function. The code was quite simple, and with some help from the interviewer identified the first issue. The issue was an incorrect mathematical function. For example the line of code was supposed to produce f(x) = y, but it was not producing y. The function was not difficult, but I couldn't figure out what the mathematical manipulation of variables should be to produce the desired outcome. The interviewer then went on to say that we had only 15 minutes left in the interview, and that we should move onto to see if we can find more issues. So we stepped through some more code assuming the first issue was working correctly. Then I found the next issue, it was exactly like the previous issue. This time the function was a little simpler, but still not something you could solve in less than 5 minutes. I tried a few different things, talking the interviewer through exactly what I was thinking. Then the interviewer said that our time was up, but that he would give me an extra five minutes to solve the current function, as I was getting pretty close. In the five minutes, I solved that function. He then asked if I had any questions about Google that would be appropriate for an engineer that it was likely the recruiter couldn't answer. I asked two questions and then we ended the call.

Interview Details – Two phone interviews followed by an on-site

Interview Details – No background questions, only the code question.
The first one is a runlength decoder, call a function iterate and write this function. The interviewer is not as patient as I think. The second one is a binary search(quite easy)
The third one is also a string, not very difficult.
I spend a lot of time on the first one, to understand the how to decode and did not communicate with the interviewer well.