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Updated Mar 20, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 6 ratings

3.8

“Difficult” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 6 ratings

Positive	33%
Neutral	33%
Negative	33%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 in Mountain View, CA (took 4+ weeks)

There were 2 technical phone interviews which went pretty well. The questions were really simple and the interviewers were really nice. I got an email a few days after to set up the on-site interview.
The on-site interview was a lot harder. First I met with the recruiter who was really nice. She showed me around for a bit and then took me to a meeting room where I had all the interviews. The questions were a lot harder, they made you think in overall solutions to big problems, instead of focusing on something small.

Overall it was nice going to MTV and meeting some of their engineers.

Interview Questions

atoi (phone interview)

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 (took a day)

The entire interview was in Portuguese. It took almost 1 hour.
First, the interviewer asked questions about my past experience, but he kept interrupting me when I was explaining the projects I've worked, so please be succint in this part.
Next, he asked me to describe two data structures: binary search trees and hash maps. He asked questions about the Big-Oh details of these structures and where both could be applied in real world projects. Then he asked me to describe the various methods of handling hash collisions.
Then he moved to the main part of the interview, the programming problem: "Given a list of integers that fall within a known short range of values (like 7 values), how to find the median value?". After he asked how I would solve it without initially knowing the range of values. The first one can be solved by simply couting using an array with length equal to the number of values. The complicated one can be solved by using a Selection algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm).
I only gave a suboptimal answer to the complicated version of the problem. Also, I was very nervous and the interviewer kept interrupting me while I was talking. He had no patience at all and didn't let me think loud.

Interview Questions

Given a list of integers that fall within a known short but unknown range of values, how to find the median value?

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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 May 2011 in Mountain View, CA (took 2 weeks)

I was contacted via LinkedIn with the opportunity to apply to Google. A current employee who went to the same university found my resume and sent it in. The interview process consisted of two, 1 hour long, back to back phone interviews. I was sent a google doc for both of them and was asked to write code into the document while the interviewer watched my thought process and coding ability on the other end.

The first interviewer asked me to code a very abstract algorithm, I think her exercise was more to see what my though process was than my coding abilities.

The second interviewer asked me to write out a few simple algorithms in code, then describe the complexity of the code. He then asked me how I could try to break my code and to implement the fixes for those edge cases. Finally I was asked if there was any way to rewrite the code more efficiently and what the complexity of that new version of the code would be.

It seemed to me like the first interview did not go very well but that the second one was much better, however I was sent an email about 2 weeks later saying that they did not have a proper fit for my qualifications.

Both interviewers were nice but did not express much emotion and were not very helpful when trying to talk a solution out loud.

Interview Questions

I was asked not to explicitly talk about the interview questions, but they involved live coding into a google doc and discussing the big O complexity of the algorithms used.

Answer Question

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?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Feb 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

After a brief phone screen consisting of a resume walk down, had two back to back 1 hour technical phone screen interviews. Phone screen interviews all consisted of technical programming challenges. Interviewers had me code into a shared google doc and explain my solutions as I went. Interviewers were helpful and provided clarification when needed, and even a few hints.

Interview Questions

Given a base 10 number, print the hexidecimal (base 16) representation of that number.

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Given a list of generic items, describe/code the approach would you take to finding the most common item.

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Given a list of integers of at least length 7, print the average of each consecutive 7 number long subsequence (sliding window).

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Other Details

I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Nov 2010 in Seattle, WA (took a day)

Two 1 hour phone interviews. They were very prompt however the interviewers were not very helpful at all. They asked their questions and then remained silent the whole time. I thought out loud and tried many solutions however didn't come up with a decently efficient one. Towards the last five minutes of the phone call, they would tell you the correct solution and then ask you if you had any questions for them to wrap up the interview....

Interview Questions

How would you find the power set of a set of numbers? Code it.

View Answers (1)

Given a word that consists of two words such as "aman" give all the combination of valid two words. You are given a dictionary to test against.

Example: aman--> a man, am an. watermelon--> water melon

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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

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Oct 2010 (took 2 days)

2 phone interviews. Pretty standard questions. First interview had an open-ended question while the second interview focused more on algorithmic questions.

Both the interviewers were pretty helpful every time I would get stuck. In the first interview, it was more like a discussion, but at the end he did ask me to code some parts of the solution I gave. The second interview was completely coding based.