Education: Tier-2 college in India
Years of Experience: 0
Prior Experience: 3 Internships ( >1 YOE)
Date of the Offer: August 2021
Company: Google
Title/Level: L3
Location: Not finalized (Bangalore/Hyderabad)
Salary: INR 16.8L
Stock bonus: ~INR 8L per year
Other Bonus: INR 1.5L Signing Bonus + INR 2.7L Performance based
Total comp (Salary + Bonus + Stock): ~31L
Benefits: Noogler cap and company tag ;)
Other details:
- it was an on-campus offer
- Preperation Level: Rated < 1000 globally on Leetcode in contests. I'm not high rated in any of the CP platforms. Don't have any outstanding projects or subject knowledge which fortunately google dosen't ask.
- Hiring Rounds Structure: 1 coding round + 3 technical interviews
Kindly feel free to ask any related queries in comments, I'll answer them for sure.
FAQ:
Q: What's my strategy to do well in LeetCode contests ? (though, I still don't consider myself good)
A: It was slow progression from doing 2 at a time to doing 3 and then 4. I make sure not to miss any contests and if I miss, I give them as virtual contests.
I think what matters is what we do after the contests:
- For the problems I couldn't solve: I upsolve them by trying on my own for some more time or reading the discussions.
- For problems I solved within time: I still read the discussions and learn from other LCers. Some, make me feel so dumb :P. This opens up a plethora of techniques and approaches which we would never know otherwise.
- I also spend some time analysing where I could've saved time and solve with a cleaner and efficient approach. Most of times, I re-write the solutions accordingly and make submissions post contest.
Q: Is Leetcode sufficient for Google ? How did I prepare ?
A: Yes, I believe LC practice will be sufficient to crack coding rounds provided you practise enough that you are comfortable with LC hard problems and consistently solve 3-4 problems in LC contests. You can maybe take this as a metric to evaluate if you got there.
However, I would recommend you to practise on codeforces and CSES problemset to get good in the game.
For practising,
- My primary source was the top interview questions list on Leetcode
- Apart from that, I focused on some advanced topics (segment tree, bit tree, divide and conquer) and solved them topic-wise on Leetcode.
- Rest of my solved problems are from contests. Regarding, how I practised for contests, I made a separate section in the post.
I follow the 30 minutes rule while solving LC problems. I try for 30 minutes without any help and if I'm not able to get any close to solving, I stop spending more time and go to discussions page. Obviously, we can't apply this for ongoing contest problems.
Hope that helps!
Note: I'm a novice who's about to enter the professional world. There are more experienced people out there who's advices are much valuable and also some great write-ups out there in the "Discuss" section. Kindly take my writings with second thought and as my personal suggestions.