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Google Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

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Updated Feb 7, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 371 ratings

3.5

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 371 ratings

Positive	38%
Neutral	42%
Negative	20%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 (took 4+ weeks)

I applied online through their careers page. After a few weeks I was contacted about a phone interview and had the phone interview and found out the result within another week. They called me personally to reject me, which was pretty nice I guess.

They didn't really want to know anything about my current job or anything I've worked on before. They asked me to tell them what it's like being on a team. Nothing more specific than that.

Then I was asked some questions about how I would design a server architecture for serving Google maps images. Unfortunately, I've really only built desktop apps before, so my answers were probably a little higher level than they were looking for.

Then I was asked to explain how quick sort and merge sort worked. I was mostly prepared to explain merge sort, but my quick sort explanation was pretty terrible.

I was also asked a programming question about counting bits in an integer that I totally bombed until the interviewer gave me a pretty big hint.

Interview Questions

Explain how quick sort and merge sort work

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 Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

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

Went to the career fair and submitted resume, they emailed me and set up an on-campus interview.

Interview Questions

Given inputs from Google Search, you have K chunks. Each chunk is individually alphabetically ordered (apple, banana, cat) ... (*apple, *banan, *cat). You want to merge all chunks into a single list. How would you do it? What limitations are there to your approach?
It's on an x86 processor, what does that mean and how does that affect your approach?

View Answers (2)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 (took 1 week)

This interview is about Google. I know there are lots of sites about Google out there, and I've probably browsed through each of those. I had a phone interview with Google a few days back... and my experience was surprisingly pleasant compared to many others.

The recruiters were very warm in their communications. Interviewers were decent too. They don't ask ridiculous questions in the phone interviews. All they look for is whether you are a legitimate candidate. They know very well about your strengths... and you will not asked anything outside of that comfort zone.

* You only need to know what YOU claim to know *

They'll probe various parts of your resume to check if you have exaggerated anything. There'll be some simple questions on data structures. I'm not a CS student, but even I could understand what they were looking for. So, all you CS folks out there, please keep your cool and take a relaxed interview.

Interview Questions

What is the biggest software project that you have worked on and how.

View Answers (1)

Some areas they will definitely touch -- OOP, strings, and data structures

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)

There was two phone interviews. Each interviewees asked one coding problem. The interviewer coded on Google document and discussed with interviewees on phone.

Interview Questions

How to find the max number of a shift buffer queue. For instance, there is an array like 5, 6,8,11,1,2, how to find the max number, which is 11 in this example.

View Answers (6)

Judge if a Sudoku solution is right.

View Answers (4)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Sep 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

Intermediate (some tough) questions about algorithms, memory usage and system scalability.

Interview Questions

Questions about algorithms and data structures.

Answer Question

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

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in New York, NY (took a day)

A hr employee was assigned to me to help me through the process. While things moved slowly, everything went smoothly.

Interview Questions

Write a program to compute if one string is a rotation of another.

View Answers (4)

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

Did 2 phone interviews. Quite good overall, and the interviewers seemed friendly, but I also got the impression from one of them that he did not give too much importance to the interviewing process. The second interviewer did not call at first, but a new interview was rescheduled. It is quite strange though to be waiting for what you feel is an important phone call that doesn't come. Then I had to reschedule again because this time I was not available on that date, since I was relocating to a different city. You have to really be sharp and have the right idea on the spot to qualify. Had to talk all the time. Test your code with small examples.

Interview Questions

data structures and array manipulation questions.

View Answers (1)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 weeks)

Got the interview through campus recruiting. First round was two onsite interviews with a tour of the office and an overview of the company, second round was onsite 3 interviews. The interview itself was pleasant, I got breakfast or lunch or both. I had the chance to talk to a lot of people, and generally everyone was really helpful. The questions ranged from manipulating arrays and linked lists to small code reviews.

Interview Questions

Given two sorted integer arrays, write an algorithm to get back the intersection.

View Answers (5)

Given the daily values of a stock, find how you can lose the most with one buy-sell trading.

View Answers (11)

Given a set of strings, a number 'n', and a function that takes a string and gives back a score, find the n largest scored strings in the set.

View Answers (5)

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 3 weeks)

Sent in my CV and cover letter by email. Invited to take a phone interview after a week. Then 3 days later, invited to a second phone interview. First one was infact, harder for me.

Interview Questions

Given a matrix of 0s and 1s, write code to get all the different ways of getting from a given cell to another, such that you can't walk through any of the cells with 0s in them.

View Answers (3)

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 in Paris (France) (took a day)

An internal recruiter found my profile online as asked if I would be interested in interviewing with Google. A phone interview shortly followed. Interview format and questions were consistent with what others reported: short introduction, a couple of informal questions on my CV, 3 coding questions on a shared document followed by questions from me.

My advice would be to learn basic data structures and algorithms, you don't have to know CLRS by heart, just basics.