Status: Member Technical Staff in a product Based company, Chennai
Position: L4 at Google
Location: Hyderabad
Date: Sep 2021

Contacted by Google Recruiter via LinkedIn and gave the contact details. Recruiter contacted me via Phone and informed me of the recruitment process at google and sent a link to apply to. Recruiter also sent links for preparation and suggested coding platforms like leetcode(Medium to hard Level suggested). Recruiter gave me a month to prepare for the Phone Interview.

Phone Interview :

The problem was divided into 3 parts and the interviewer added complexity one by one till the end. It is an LC-Medium difficulty problem. (Didn't see any related problem on leetcode ). If you know basic traversals you could easily solve it.

Recruiter contacted me via phone and informed me that the last round went well and wanted to proceed to scheduling the next 3 rounds of Onsite interviews out of 5 rounds. If the next 3 rounds trends positive then they will schedule for Googliness and final technical Interview.

For the phone Interview I was mostly concentrated on solving medium difficulty problems from Google Tagged questions for the last 6 months.

Onsite Interview

Round 1 : Coding

LC - Medium problem with find and replace on a string. Was able to solve all the edge cases within time. Feedback was positive from the recruiter.

Round 2 : Coding

LC - Hard problem based on 2d Grid. Was not able to solve it completely and the feedback was bad from the recruiter.

Round 3 : Coding

LC - Medium problem based on run-length encoding. Solved it within time covering all the edge cases. But the response from the recruiter was bad because the interviewer had another followup in mind. Interviewer has felt that I took much time in solving the easy part. This shocked me.

Recruiter contacted me again via phone and wanted to schedule the next 2 rounds and stressed that I need to do Extremely Well in the upcoming rounds because I had two bad rounds.

Round 4 : Googliness & Leadership

Standard G&L questions.

• Assume your manager gives you a task to design a system. How would you do it ? How would you resolve ambiguity ?
• Have you ever stepped up for the team ?
• How do you resolve conflicts with your team members ?
• Have you ever been in a situation where another team and yours were creating a similar product ? What happened ?

The feedback from the recruiter was positive. I had prepared well for this round using the STAR framework so nailed this round.

Round 5 : Coding

LC - Hard problem with binary tree traversal. Need to solve this in constant space. Even though I did it, the interviewer felt that I didn't do well because I missed some edge cases.

Feedback from the recruiter was negative and as I didn't meet the bar, my results were not sent to the Hiring Committee. The main negative from my side was the comprehension ability to explain my coding in a short time. Need to improve my ability to convey my thoughts quickly.

I prepared for 6 Months rigorously for Google and failed. But I got an offer from Amazon and accepted it. You can read the complete prepartion experience here[https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1588524/Oracle(Offer)-or-Google-(Reject)-or-Amazon-(Offer)].