Just wanted to share a recent onsite interview I had with google.

Feb- Recruiter reaches out to me but I don't see the email until May, when I reply. Onsites are scheduled for June so I had 1 month to prepare

Onsites:
I had 3 technicall and one behavioral/googliness round

• Round 1 behavioral: i think i did ok, was very smiley and answered honestly. Interviewer was very chill
  • My guess: H
• Round 2 technical: we start the interview 10 min late because I entered the wrong interview link. Straightforward arrays question.
  • I mess up a bit by forgetting a part of the question and start coding, interviewer points it out and I write up a working solution immediately.
  • I come up w some optimizations but not the one the interviewer wanted. I couldn't get the one he wanted without hints, after which he asked me to code it up and i did so with no issues. Not sure how well I did considering the hint he gave was basicaly just handwalking me thru the optimal solution so I felt strange coding exactly what he asked.
  • Guess: LNH/LH
• Round 3 technical: a question involving randomness
  • I get solution and first followup easily.
  • Second followup I was a bit stuck on. I throw out suggestions on what to do and surprisingly one of them lands (but not after 5 min of struggling) and interviewer likes it and asks me to code it up in the remaining time.
  • Interviewer showed very little emotion but since I was able to do everything, I felt good about this round
  • Guess: H
• Round 4 technical: Graph/DP question w a trick
  • LC hard question. I was very clear in communicating and coded it up quickly, I knew it wasn't optimal but even though I had a vague notion of the optimal solution, I figured it would be better to communicate and code quickly a working solution rather than struggle and maybe fail to write up the optimal. However, interviewer seemed more interested in the process rather than the optimal sollution
  • I suggest ways to optimize it using DP/memoization and he doesn't ask me to code it up and was content to just discuss it
  • I would consider this my best round except Interviewer asks about space complexitiy and I get it wrong... however he was nice and we spent an extra 30 min discussing google bc he was my last interview and because it was a hard question, I felt ok about it
  • Guess: LH (for the space complexity question)/H

UPDATE: my recruiter called to reject me. When I asked why, he said that I did not answer a space complexity question correct. I asked him if that was all, and he said that i also had "one too many" hints. Despite the reject, it was a good experience. Considering I thought I did well for just a month of prep, I'll prep longer starting now and try again later, thanks for reading!