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    Google Software Engineer Interview Questions

    Updated Sep 19, 2017
    2,575 Interview Reviews

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    Helpful (1611)  

    Software Engineer Interview

    Anonymous Employee in Mountain View, CA
    Accepted Offer
    Positive Experience
    Difficult Interview

    Application

    I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in April 2014.

    Interview

    Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks.

    The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple:
    1) Dynamic Programming
    2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs)
    3) Probability related programs
    4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough
    5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,...
    6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up.
    7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape.
    8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought.
    9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience.
    10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math.
    11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know.
    12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too!

    Interview 1:
    Graph related question and super recursion

    Interview 2:
    Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel.

    Interview 3:
    Array and Tree related questions

    Interview 4:
    Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs.

    Interview 5:
    Dynamic programming,
    Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc.

    At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems).

    Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."

    Negotiation

    You can and should negotiate politely. You are in a stronger position if you have another offer, but even otherwise, you should ask for more of every type of payment!

    Other Interview Reviews for Google

    1. Helpful (652)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      I first had a phone screen interview. After this, I was asked to come onsite for further interviews. I had 4 whiteboard and 1 lunch interview with the Youtube team. After this, I was told that my application is going through the Hiring Committee.

      Hiring committee asked my HR to find a team for me before giving any decision. I then had two phone interviews with different teams in Android. I informed my HR that I am interested in the first team. Next day, HR emailed me and said that this team no longer has an open position. I again went through the same process. This time, platform team was interested in talking to me. I gave 2 phone interviews wherein they made me write code. After their feedback, I was put through the Hiring committee again and this time I got a thumbs up from them. 1 week after that I was put through executive committee and got my offer.

      I had 7 other offers and my HR asked me about all of them before putting me through executive review. They gave me more than any other company I had offer from.

    2. Helpful (542)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Mountain View, CA
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in July 2015.

      Interview

      The interview went seemingly smoothly, except for a couple quirks in the code on the whiteboard. The questions were way easier than I expected. The interviewers were not intimidating at all and did not try to make the process stressful. I felt like I passed and according to HR, the overall feedback was positive. My application went to the hiring committee which, in turn, rejected the offer.

      3. Join the Google team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (290)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Mountain View, CA
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Easy Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in September 2015.

      Interview

      Awesome process. Very simple questions. Keep your nerves cool. Don't worry about very complex questions on the Internet. Do basics and you should be good. I screwed up two simple questions and not expecting offer. I will apply again next year .

    4.  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      One hour technical phone interview. Spoke with a recruiter who explained the on site interview process and answered any questions I had. On site interview consisted of 4 separate one hour technical interviews with a 35 minute lunch "interview" between.

      Interview Questions

      • Find n closest points to the origin (any language)   1 Answer

    5. Helpful (1)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience

      Interview

      got an email from a recruiter that i had to give a test. coding test then i solved both questions but time complexity was of O(n^2) maybe that is the reason of rejection

      Interview Questions

      • both questions were from leetcode Given a string s, find the longest palindromic substring in s. You may assume that the maximum length of s is 1000.   1 Answer

    6.  

      Software Engineering Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Declined Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Two 45 min phone interviews. Pretty standard technical questions covering algorithms and data structures. Most material covered in introductory programming classes. Good knowledge of one programming language necessary. Got referred by a previous intern, was contacted by a recruiter to set up date and time for phone screen.

      Interview Questions

    7.  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Mountain View, CA
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in August 2017.

      Interview

      Contacted by a recruiter first. I spent two weeks preparing for the technical phone interview. The phone interview involved some questions about my past projects, then coding exercise using google doc.

      Interview Questions

      • Topological sort for directed Graph   1 Answer

    8. Helpful (3)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Interview

      Very structured. In most companies, something to remember is that they go deep, during the interview, into the projects you mention in your CV. So, technical questions are asked as you describe one of your projects

      Interview Questions

      • For how long do you plan to say in USA   1 Answer

    9. Helpful (1)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Initial phone screen went well, followed by technical phone screen. Technical phone screen involved discussion of past work/research experience, followed by coding portion. Discussions went well. Coding problem was actually quite easy, but time got the best of me and I ended up giving a working but less than elegant solution. Received feedback in days, saying there were many positives ended up passing on me.

      Interview Questions

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