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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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3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed May 2010 (took 2 days)

They called me to ask some questions and I answered them over the phone. They asked some personal questions about my background and family also. They then asked college/degree related questions that I answered aswell.

Interview Questions

How long have you waited for us to contact you?

Answer Question

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 Sep 2011 in Kirkland, WA (took 2 months)

I applied online and after 2-3 weeks a recruiter contacted me, he was very helpful and friendly, we had an initial 30 min phone interview to tell me about the company and the interview process, then he scheduled me for two technical phone interviews back to back, each one is 1 hour. They asked the regular problem solving questions (Not very advanced) and 1 design question, i did well and the recruiter invited me to visit them to have a physical interview.

They arranged everything and i was supposed to be there 2 days before the interview, and leave 1 day after, but while travelling to them I encountered some problems ( due to latency in flights ), i finally reached there 1 day late and i lost my bag, and i had to be ready for the interview next day in morning, I asked the recruiter if they can postpone the interview 1 day, because its not fair to interview someone who has been travelling for 2 days and having a severe jet lag, but they refused. I finally went to the interview which consists of 6 back to back interviews, they varied in the difficulty of the questions, and you have to write code quickly to be able to finish the questions.

Interview Questions

I can't really tell about the question, but they vary between different problem solving questions like trees, string manipulations and complex recursion.

Answer Question

Other Details

I Applied Online 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 Oct 2011 (took 3 weeks)

This is an on-campus interview for new grads, and I got it from the career resource center of my university. The interview process consists two 1-to-1 interviews. Both of them almost start directly with technical questions and last for 45 min. each. The interview is quite general so you don't know which department the interviewer may from. The questions may range form basic programming questions to advance topics such as database or real-world applications.

Interview Questions

Describe what you will do to enhance the indexing performance of the map service.

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

5.0

Very Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)

Got contacted by the Google representative after applying online and accepted the on-campus interview. Went to the interview the next day and was really nervous about the immense pressure coming from the instant coding that is required for such interview. Interview consisted of two back to back interviews with developers at Google and was again really stressful.

Interview Questions

Reverse all the words in a string

View Answers (5)

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 1+ week)

Had an Interview on the Google Pittsburgh office. The Pittsburgh office is relative new and some of the inside structures are still under construction. They have two 1 on 1 interviews, all technical for software engineering positions. Each lasted 45 minutes. Very few resume questions, almost directly whiteboard coding. The questions you would gonna get depend on the specific interviewer. According to my feedback from my classmates and my own experience, some just got very easy ones(simple sorting) and some got really bad ones(as bad as you can imagine). There was only was big question but they would asked more and deeper around the topic.

Interview Questions

Write the binary search.

View Answers (1)

Analyze quick sort.

Answer Question

Other Details

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

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2009 in Hyderabad (India) (took a day)

Questions covering all fields of computer science with multiple choice questions. Followed by a programming question to implement a tree.

Interview Questions

Quad tree

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2011 (took 1 week)

I'm very nervous. And this is a phone interview. Sometimes I cannot hear clearly.

Interview Questions

Write a function to modify a singly linked list, appending copies of the first N-1 elements to the end in reverse order. For example, ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'] becomes ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'C', 'B', 'A'].

View Answers (8)

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 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)

Recruiter called me and set me up for a phone interview. Phone interview consisted of a simple coding question about an array of structs in C. Some questions about my thesis.

Interview Questions

Given an array of structs: write a function that finds equal values in all the structs in the array

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 Oct 2011 (took 2 months)

I got the interview through a Google recruiter who contacted me based on a resume submission on Google career website.

The recruiter did a basic screening where he went over my background and the current projects I am working on and to clarify any questions I have about working at google.

I gave 2 phone interviews where there were questions on CS fundamentals and coding on a shared google doc.

Interview Questions

Game of Life - write a function to calculate next state of the board based on current state

View Answers (3)

You have a n number of cities. Lets say city 1 has some information that needs to be sent to all other n-1 cities using minimal cost. Cost between each pair of cities is given. any number of cities can transmit the information once they receive the information but the overall total cost should be minimum

View Answers (2)

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 Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2011 in New Delhi (India) (took 3 weeks)

First of all, a very well-prepared resume has to be sent to a friend or a person who is familiar to you if you want to be called on earlier.

2nd, Phone screening test will be set by your recruiter if he finds your resume more approachable than others with respect to the job openings.
Approx. 1 hr of test and the questions are somewhat descriptive.

3rd, If you are lucky enough, then wait for some days to hear from your recruiter the news you expect most.
Be ready for the On-Site interview hurdle...
--now you'll face 3-4 1-on-1 interviews.
--you'll be asked to write down a solution to the algorithmic problem just given to you that must be 100% correct. Your interviewer may also ask you about the critical cases where your solution may get stuck. So try to be well-prepared about debugging on paper and pencil.
--one system architecture problem and some more miscellaneous questions about google may be asked also.
--Strategy for approaching problems: small examples, corner cases. brute force, clarify question, think aloud, do not freeze. Still stuck? try binary search, hashing, or dynamic programming.

Finally, after the interview-
--write a little thank you note
--be patient - normally it takes a long time to hear back.

Be Happy and Successful in interviews!

Interview Questions

Given two numbers m and n, write a method to return the first number r that is
divisible by both (e.g., the least common multiple).

View Answers (2)

Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Presentation, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test, a Personality Test and a Background Check.