Status: New grad, BS CS Top 20 CS school
Position: SWE L3 at Google (New Grad)
Location: Mountain View, CA
Date: October 19, 2021

Hi everyone,

Wanted to share my interview with Google for their New Grad SWE position. Please leave similar leetcode problems/solutions to the problems below so that people can learn from this post.

One Behavioral Interview

1. Tell me about yourself
2. Tell me about a technical project and a decision you had to make.
3. What would you do if someone is slacking on your team?
4. Imagine a scenario where you disagree with someone. How do you handle that?

Four Technical Interviews:

1. Part 1: Design a function that determines whether an attendance string (e.g. “LLOAA”) will give the student detention. "O" = On Time, "L" = Late, "A" = Absent. The students gets detention if there are more than 2 consecutive lates, and more than 1 absence.
   Part 2: Given a length, provide the number of all permutations of an attendance that will not get the student a detention. E.g. given 2, the possible outcomes are ("OO", "OL", "LO", "OA", "AO", "LA", "AL", "LL").

2. Three players are playing a game. Given a matrix, where each letter represents a player’s spot, return the maximum area of the largest rectangle owned by a player.

   1. E.g.
   2. [ABBC]
   3. [ABBC]
   4. [CBAA]
      1. Answer = 4, B is the winner. Return 4.
         Follow-Up: How would you solve the problem if there were N players?

3. Given a binary tree, find the least common ancestors of two given nodes. https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-tree/

4. Given an unsorted array and target, find the indices of target if the array was sorted. There can be duplicate targets in array.

   1. Follow-up: Solve the solution in O(N) time
   2. Follow-up again: Given array with no target, find target, a.k.a the element with the most duplicates in the array, and the return the indices of them if the array was sorted

Overall, I was rather dissapointed with my Google interview experience. Working at Google doing SWE was always a pipe dream of mine because I thought I loved their products, their culture, and diversity.
I still love their products, but their culture is not what I thought it was.

The first red flag was after the technical screen. We had an event where candidates were brought on a Google Meet call and were simultaneuously introduced to the details of our final round interview. Before the meeting, my recruiter actually encouraged me to hide my name in the Google Meet because there were "other candidates in the call." Sure, privacy, and who knows, maybe some people are bad actors. But was my recruiter basically hinting that people who interview for Google are historically toxic? Idk. But here comes the real problem.

During my actual interview itself, it was Google's standard super-day -- 5 back-to-back interview, 1 behavioral and 4 technical. I was really excited. Remember, in my head, Google was fun, diverse, and had great culture.

To paint the picture, all 5 of my interviewers were Asian dudes. Nothing wrong with that. What was wrong, was that 4 out of 5 of them were boring, did not smile and all, and 1 of which was even rude to me during the interview. It didn't even seem like he was paying attention (I'm pretty sure I could literally hear his message-send noise going off in the background). Not a single interviewer after the behavioral asked about who I was or my passion in Google -- I didn't even get asked "Why Google?" Like seriously? I worked at Amazon last summer, which is known for bad culture, and even they asked me that.

I ended up not getting the offer, so call be biased against Google or whatever, but even if I did get the offer I'm not sure how happy I'd really be. Anyway, if you've read this far, my experience is simply my experience -- I'm sure there are many who've had a great interview experience with them. Mine, unfortunately, was dissapointing.