A Google recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn a couple of months back & my screening round got scheduled a month later. To my surprise, no one appeared on the interview call even after waiting for 20 minutes. It got rescheduled and guess what, no one appeared on the rescheduled interview either. By this time, I had already solved 250+ LCs (150+ medium & 50+ hard) & had around 10 mock interviews on a well known site. Also, I was a bit pissed with the rescheduling thing but I maintained my composure. On the third reschedule, 20+ days after the actual schedule, the interviewer finally appeared on the interview and here's my experience -

Round 0 - Screening Round
Interviewer introduced himself, briefed me about the session, & jumped directly into the coding question. Won't disclose the exact question but it was a LC medium, more of a real-world application. I was able to come up with multiple approaches, starting with the brute-force & then arriving at the most optimal one. I also kept communicating with the interviewer to ensure that he's informed where I'm headed. My only mistake: I took a bit longer since I initially went in a different direction & thus, ended up with only 7-8 minutes left for the coding part. As a result, I wasn't able to produce high quality code (some if/else could've been simplified tbh). At the end of the 45 minutes, I still had a small part of my code remaining to be completed but the interviewer wasn't ready to extend it even for a minute & asked me to stop, thanked me, & hung up.

Got the feedback after more than a week and it was a no-hire. So basically, it was a reject. The feedback indirectly meant that I was rejected for not completing the interview on time. I was a bit surprised to see that it didn't mention even a single positive (as if I was completely blank throughout the session).

If this is how they hire, I think I'll need to have a lucky day when I'm asked a question that I've already seen before. I do agree that I took a bit longer to arrive at the optimal solution but isn't that thinking/problem-solving part worth anything? Is finishing everthing under 45 minutes more important than all other factors? Is it not even worth extending the interview by a couple of minutes just to better judge a candidate's ability?

Anyway, this was my first interview experience with what they say a "FAANG" company & I must say, I will never glamorize them as I used to before. Now I know that they don't even have the basic mechanisms in place to ensure that the interview happens as scheduled & the candidate is kept updated (this happened with me at multiple FAANGs).

The only positive that I'm taking away from this fiasco is my well-polished DSA skills; those might come handy some day.

Till then, keep hustling!