STATUS: Final Year [2021], B.E. Computer Science and Engineering, Tier-3
POSITION: University Graduate, SDE
LOCATION: India
DATE: December, 2020

Timeline [Application -> Interview]

• Applied via, Google careers portal (No referral, all credit to talent acquisition department and a small cover letter).
• Was contacted by a recruiter after 5 days of application.
• I had to reply to the email with answers of few questions like "why google", "what language do i prefer" etc.
• She also asked me to schedule a 15 mins chat with her. Shared her own calendar.
• I scheduled a call after 3 days [November 13, 2020],
• Passed recruiter screening and scheduled 1st technical interview on December 1, 2021.
• Recruiter scheduled a call for December 2, 2021 to give me feedback.
• Didn't clear the 1st round but she wanted to give me another opportunity.
• She asked me to practice more and reschedule.
• I rescheduled after 2 weeks [December 13, 2020]
• Didn't clear.
• Received update.

Recruiter Phone Screening [15 min chat]

• Received update in the morning that call has been delayed by an hour.
• She joined at the updated time. Greeted and introduced herself.
• She asked me to start by mentioning my projects and activities.
• I mentioned my internship, project and programming club.
• She asked me to dwell into competitive programming. I did.
• After all this, she started the rapid fire round of technical questions.
• I was instructed to answer directly without any explanation.
• She asked 10-15 questions about C++ STL, DS and Algorithms.
• At the end of rapid fire she asked me to rate myself in the knowledge of a list of things.
• She asked me what I thought of the questions and informed me that I actually got one of them wrong.
• I acknowledged, and she informed me then and there that I had qualified for the next round.

Prep-Session For Technical Phone Screen

• A meeting was scheduled later in the day to prep me and other candidates for coming technical rounds.
• She explained about the interview process, style of the questions and suggested some things to keep in mind while practicing.

Technical Phone Screen - 1

• The interviewer joined the meeting and introduced himself.
• Asked me to tell a bit about myself, my projects etc.
• He asked to open the shared document.
• He shared the question. It was not a hard question.
• The question's essence was based on "Minimize cash flow" but much much simpler.
• He probably would have moved to complex form if we had time.
• I asked him some questions and started to explain the approach.
• He asked me several questions along the way about what i was doing. He was asking me to rename every variable I typed in the shared document.
• I was severely unprepared. I wasn't able to explain my thought process or my code clearly.
• I lost track of time and kept explaining for 40 MINS!!!
• He pointed out when we had 5-10 mins left and asked me if I could code the solution.
• I started coding and completed most of it. But realized that I didn't consider many cases because of the hype.
• I knew then and there. I was going to fail it.

Feedback From The Recruiter

• She asked me what I thought of the interview.
• She mentioned she had both good and bad news for me.
• She said the interviewer doesn't recommend going forward because my code was buggy and speed was slow. My approach was unnecessarily complex.
• I agreed (not because my approach was complex but I wasn't able to explain, in time).
• She said she sees potential though and wants to give me another opportunity.
• She asked me to schedule another interview and prepare thoroughly because she can't give me a 3rd chance.
• I thanked and rescheduled after a fortnight.

Technical Phone Screen - 2

• This interviewer had a vastly different personality than the first one. This one was direct and cold. compared to the first one.
• He introduced himself and after my "myself" speech shared the question.
• It was a basic question to understand - "Sum of minimum elements from all subarrays"
• I was able to figure out its brute force early.
• He asked me about optimizing the approach (and I cried at that for a while).
• After some struggle I could sense that I needed to somehow get minimum values from each subarray in linear time but I couldn't quite come up with the code.
• He watched me reach this point patiently and then wrapped up.
• I didn't need any update. I knew the result! 😢

Points to Note

• Interviewing is a lot different than a DS/ALGO exam,
• All of my failures here were a result of me being unprepared specifically for interviewing.
• There is a lot that goes in it beyond coding.
• I started practicing exactly for this during the next 4 months.
• and I guess I did better in my next interview.

All the best!