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    Google Software Engineer Interview Questions

    Updated Dec 9, 2018
    2,976 Interview Reviews

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    Helpful (3)  

    Software Engineer Interview

    Anonymous Interview Candidate in Mountain View, CA
    No Offer
    Neutral Experience
    Difficult Interview

    Application

    I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in April 2014.

    Interview

    I was contacted by a recruiter for Google in February 2014 for a new graduate software developer position. The interviews were outlined as follows (but were punctuated with many conversations with my recruiter):

    1) Phone interview with recruiter to assess goals and ideal company culture. I'm sure that other topics were discussed, but it felt more like I was being sold on the company than being interviewed.
    2) 1 hour technical phone interview using a Google Doc. I was given a small problem that required a lot of thought and had multiple solutions. The problem itself only required basic computer science knowledge, but was heavily dependent on your problem solving abilities.
    3) 4 on site interviews in one day. I can't discuss what transpired, but I can confidently say these were the toughest interview questions I've ever encountered. The day felt incredibly long, and by the time I got to my final interview I was already mentally exhausted.

    Now in August, I'm still waiting to hear back from my recruiter.

    Interview Questions

    • Can't say due to NDA. Sorry!   1 Answer

    Other Interview Reviews for Google

    1. Helpful (24)  

      Software Engineer Interview

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

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in August 2014.

      Interview

      5 in-house technical interviews. 4 algo/coding and 1 design.

      - strtok implementation
      - given set of characters duplicates possible, and given dictionary (list of words). Find longest word from dictionary that can be made from given characters. How will you do it if '*' (matches one wild character) is also included?
      - Access card system design
      - Implement a stack with find_min api as well.
      - Given set of points, find line with max points on it.
      - utf-8 byte stream verification and character extraction.

      Interview Questions

      • Most difficult part is judging what interviewers want who don't talk that much and just keep on scrribling stuff down.   2 Answers

    2. Helpful (4)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

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

      Interview

      The interview was an phone interview, mostly technical and lots about previous projects which i have done, and also work flow of projects, technical questions were also mostly.. Most of the questions are logical thinking and puzzles

      3. Join the Google team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (10)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Contacted by HR at early July, asking whether I can have an phone interview in 3 weeks. Replied "not available until August". Contacted again in late July and scheduled a phone interview in late August.

      During the interview, I was asked to talk about my resume, including project and research experiences. Then asked to write a class to define a deck of cards, and write shuffle function for the cards.

      Interview Questions

      • was asked to write a class to define a deck of cards, and write shuffle function for the cards.   1 Answer

    4.  

      Software Engineer Interview

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

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in September 2013.

      Interview

      I had 2 interviews on hang outs one day, and an extra interview a month later, on hang outs too.
      the first two were easy, I didn't do it super well though. The third and last one was really hard, my hardest interview ever. They asked me a lot of questions about design and coding, most of them really hard.

      Interview Questions

      • I was solving a problem with some design patterns, about a server receiving requests, and then the interviewer change the problem, now the server could have multiple requests at the same time, and instead of a design problem it was a concurrent programming problem.   2 Answers

    5. Helpful (5)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Applied online without referral. Recruiter reached out to me. I filled a questionnaire to indicate my interests. Got two phone interviews. They were not very hard. After the phone interviews, you learn in a few days if you have passed. Then, you are in a pool and wait for someone to be interested in you. If you know people at the company, definitely let them know so that they can inform their friends that you are looking for an intern host. If someone is interested, a host interview is set-up. This is usually non-technical and only to see if you are interested in the project. If no one comes up after some time, they defer your application to next internship season. Next time, you directly enter the pool without any additional interviews.

      Recruiter is also a key person. Sometimes, they look out for you, sometimes they don't care.

      Interview Questions

      • Nothing unexpected. Typical questions that you can find in "Cracking the coding interview" or "Programming interviews exposed".   1 Answer

    6. Helpful (1)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Declined Offer
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Referred by an employee in MTV. HR called me soon, and scheduled two 45-miniute online interviews for me. The HR was very nice, for I was in Beijing and applied for an internship in MTV that time, in order to help me perform well in the interview, she scheduled the engineers from Canada to interview me, that helped me a lot, because the time zone of Canada office was better for me to take the interview on form.
      The interviews went well, and the interviewers were nice and patient. The coding problems they asked were mainly about algorithm and data structure, and some of my project experiences were asked in detail two.
      I think the most challenging thing in the interviews was that I should describe my thought in English to the interviewers, it is very important to have a good communication with interviewers.

      Interview Questions

      • There were no questions particularly difficult, but what I did not expect was that the second interviewer asked me a problem of segment tree.   2 Answers

      Reasons for Declining

      I was matched to a test post, but I did not like it.

    7.  

      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 November 2013.

      Interview

      Only have one phone screen technical interview and then onsite interview. I only have three interviews onsite. One wass in the morning, then two in the afternoon. They also would arrange two persons bring you to their food center. The food there is so nice. The process was easy and fast.

      Interview Questions

    8. Helpful (2)  

      Software Engineer Interview

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

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in July 2014.

      Interview

      45 minute phone interview: program a computational geometry problem, the phone interviewer did not ask anything else at all.

      onsite:

      preparation:
      I prepared for two weeks. I had been asked to brush up on my algorithms. So I basically took, the online versions of Prof: Tim Roughgarden's Algorithms class @ Stanford and parts of Prof. Erik Demain's class on Advanced data structures. @ mit. Also geeksforgeeks.org also helped me. Even if you don't get into google, I would say that taking these classes are very good for your future technical skills.

      5 people interviewed me, 45 minutes each. None of the 5 interviewers asked me any algorithm heavy questions. There was no topcoder style questions either. Most of the questions were related to my domain area viz: computer vision and machine learning. Since I had just switched into these areas, I was not an expert and my answers were often patchy. One of the interviewers asked me a question on large scale system design.

      I am just waiting for the results.

      Interview Questions

      • An open ended question on large scale system design, for this you need to be an internet programmer, knowing about issues related to data replication, data availability, large scale scaling etc. I was very patchy on all of these areas.   1 Answer

    9. Helpful (1)  

      Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in April 2014.

      Interview

      Each of the questions were designed such that you will never get the perfect answer, especially on the first try. The problems were specifically made to stump you, and so you can continuously improve your design and show that you're curious to learn and improve.

      Interview Questions

      • They asked about servers and how networks functioned and I have no background with that topic.   1 Answer
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