Google Software Engineering Interview Questions & Reviews

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 – 2 rounds of phone interviews and then onsite

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.

Interview Details – I was contacted by one of their recruiters through LinkedIn.I went through an initial phone screening which was mostly behavioral questions regarding goals and background. I got to skip the phone interview and was set up with a onsite interview which consisted of four interviews.

Interview Details – Very odd interviewing process. I had applied to work in Google Finance in Mountain View, they ended up calling me about a position for Google in Shanghai. I had no interest in moving out there. Furthermore, very strange interview process. I was expecting to work on the Google Finance front-end, but they ended up asking me a whole bunch of search engine related questions which I was not prepared for.

Interview Details – For the reading impatient, in a nutshell: I found the interview process (non-US citizen) extremely long, very tedious, and in a sense dehumanizing (in your phone interviews you get your code questions, write the answers and very little else matters). Overall, the whole ordeal was very life draining, and comparing with peers that were going through it at the same time (as I later learned), very focused on a specific type of developer/engineer: without exception very experienced people were rejected.

Google can hire whom they please, but if they know the profile of the person they want to hire, why bother contacting people with 10+ years of experience only to reject them all later? It's a waste of time for them and the interviewees even more so. One could arguably say that it is disrespectful as well.

For those caring for all the details: I was contacted by a recruiter mid 2012, asking if I was interested in discussing a position. I'm not a US citizen, so I was dumbfounded. Of couse I was interested, but why would they contact me then? (I had sent a resume to Google Brasil years prior, with no response).

So a month after I responded I finally heard back, and we agreed because of the project I was in and their timelines to start the process in December. Apparently someone had recommended me, and wanted to remain anonymous. So here we had about 5 months worth of time that I took to practice Portuguese again, brush up my resume with competitions, study, and get Android experience.

During that time, I started to learn that certain other people in my country had also been contacted, some with a similar set of skills and experience. So clearly there was a larger, coordinated effort going on, not just an interest in myself, this made sense but it also made me more wary of it.

December came and I contacted the recruiter once more, and they requested that we start the process in January. So New Years' studying and January came, and finally got a call. I was expecting a technical interview at once, but got another screening (similar to the one the year before) instead. After some email back and forth, a coding interview was scheduled for mid February.

The interview itself was a coding problem of some calculations, and I thought I blew it. To my surprise I was contacted again the next week, and another interview set for the beginning of March.

That one started by the engineer unable to call my phone, I had to call him international, and explain how to call me. Some 15 minutes were spent there. So finally I got some web system design and scalability questions, that (with guidance mind you) I think I answered successfully. I felt much better after that interview.

But weeks rolled by with no response, I was a nervous wreck, so I wrote back asking what the status was (as April was a deadline for H1B), and eventually I got a response that because of the engineer's feedback the process was over for me. I honestly appreciated getting the response, but obviously was not happy.

I was taken aback, but what surprised me even more was that engineers that I consider better than myself, were also getting interviews and also didn't get a lot further. The pattern seemed to be people with plenty of experience (10+ years), multiple team positions, and a history of leadership as well. A pattern hard to ignore.

In the end, like I said, the experience was very life draining, I would not enter into it again lightly. Consider a hiring process that takes months and months (unnecessarily, ie. 3 months for 2 coding interviews), that is not a good indicator of the health of the hiring workflow.