Google L4 India [Reject]
Anonymous User
2820

Recently interviewed with Google India for L4 position. Can't discuss the exact questions, but can share the process.

Reached out by the recruiter and he then scheduled the the first phone screen.

The question was very easy (It basically involved traversing a 2d binary array). While the approach was correct, I missed some edge cases in the code. While fixing those cases I introduced more bugs.
A follow-up was then asked to optimise in best case scenario(worst case time complexity was still same). I correctly gave the binary search approach, but with one bug.

The result of this interview was borderline hire. Because of this reason, recruiter decided to conduct only 2 onsite interviews instead of standard 4 onsite rounds. He mentioned if I repeat the same mistake of missing edge cases/bugs, the loop will be cut short here itself.

The first onsite was one of the hardest questions I encountered. I'm pretty sure even with months of prep, there was no way I could have solved it in 45 minutes. It involved traversing an HTML which was in the form of a tree. While I could complete this problem with struggle, the followup of the problem was really hard and almost impossible to complete in 45 minutes. Understanding the followup itself took about 10 minutes.

The second onsite I was asked only one problem regarding dependency resolution. I provided a DFS solution with so much struggle and multiple bugs (later on came to know that it is solved by topological sort).

As expected, the result was a no-hire with a cool-off period of 1 year :(

The mistake I made was not preparing and practicing before appearing for the interviews. My phone screen and 2nd onsite would have been much better in that case. However the first onsite would still be hard, but considering all feedback, I would have probably got a chance for full 4 interview onsite loop.

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