Current status:
12 YOE.
BS, MS in CS.
Primarily back-end dev - Rust, C, and embededded.

Interviewing for general L4 SWE role at Google in East Coast location. Possibilty for L3 or L5.

Interview 1

Almost exact version of simple string compression from top Google leetcode problems. I was so lucky because I spent 2 hours on it the exact night before the interview. I feel like I crushed this, but the interviewer was hard to connect with personally. Before time was through, she corrected a few off-by-one bugs (I thanked her) and then said it all looks correct. No follow up. I literally felt like I could copy-paste this to leetcode and have it work (although the compression format was slightly different).

5/5
(Maybe 4/5 since she wasn't easy to connect with)

Interview 2

Determine if you have a winning hand in mahjong. Worst one of the day, it was a problem that seemed very hard but in hindsight rather easy in hindsight. I had the correct intuition, but hard time coding it up and figuring out the correct recursive structre. The guy was so cool and chill, stuck with me an extra fifteen minutes, walked me through a helper function. When I debriefed my recruiter, I specifically said this guy was great to wok with, even if I didn't really nail this problem.

1.5/5 or 2/5 (great personal connection and discussion, but barely reached the end without truly answering question)

Interview 3

Consider data structure that takes (x, y) points with an add method. Determine if the most recent (x, y) point completes a square (ie the new point, plus 3 existing points in the structure form a square. I went on a bit of a tangent trying like a recursive DFS parameterized with a given length for too long. It may even have worked but he guided me toward a much simpler solution. I didn't code it exactly correct, but I had a white board behind me, walked through it, wrote pseudo-code for it on the doc, accurately described the complexity, and he seemed satisfied. The interviewer ineteresting went back to say my original solution may even have been O(n) too, even though it was convoluted. Hard guy to connect with and hard to guage.

2.5/5 or 3/5

Interview 4 ("Leadership")

Very hard to guage. At one point, 2/3 of way through, she was like "Yes! I agree with everything you said!". I was talking a lot about initiative, autonomy, creativity, mentorship, yada yada. She was easy to connect with. Talked about her hobbies and background. At one point I felt so in the groove I was basically dropping questions to answers not explicitly asked (for example, in the course of answering a question, I'd mention a lession I learned from a failed project in the past, etc). We ended right on time. Toward the end she said she needed to look at the document for any question prompts but thought we were good. Only weird thing was she asked "What would you do if you worked on a smile-detection app and it wasn't detecting smiles for some people". It wsa a super loosy-goosey question - and I was wondering if she's trying to prompt for how I would handle if it's not working for people of certain ethnicity. I asked follow up questions but it was so vague and it was just such a weird 2 or 3 minutes. Fortunately, when it was over we were back to having great momentum in the conversation. By the end she said she had all the info she needed. I said anything else I can provide, she said we're good.

Hard to guage, really.

5/5 (If my intuition was correct). 3/5 if that weird smile thing counted for more than I thought.

Interview 5

Consider an n-way tree, with some leafs containing strings (structured document model), given a search string, return which nodes it spans. I actually got through this finishing in time. The guy was super cool, really easy to connect with. Thought BFS but ended up having to be a pre-order traversal with some follow on. He was nodding the entire time. Lots of "exactlys". In the few minutes before we ended I was trying to refine the code I had written out (even leaving a helper method empty) and he was like "nah man you're good".

It was weird that he kept telling me not to worry about certain details when I went to dive into them. But otherwise

5/5

Weird lessons: You're supposed to ask clarifying questions. I did. in 3 of the 5 interviews it actually stopped the interviewers dead for a minute while they themselves thought about whether such a case is permitted or not.

Worked full-time while preppring while dealing with family stuff and baby about to arrive. Leetcode for about a month in evening and weekend. Took 2 days of PTO to prep all-day. My mental health is not good now. Even when the interview is over it's hard letting go. I will try to take rejection gracefully, but I put a lot of intense work over the past 5 weeks with everything else in my life going on. Back from one grind to another.

I'll hear in probably 5 days - anyone want to take any bets? Have any instict what those results mean?

TLDR- Optimisitcally give myself 5/5 on 3 of 5 interviews. Mostly bombed one interview. Correct but not great performance on a final one.