Years of experience: 3 years 7 months
Position offered at Google : L4

Hello friends,

Now I am finally done with my interviews and would like to share my interview experience with google.

Difficulty level: Medium.
I know this might sound weird to some people but yes I consider Google interviews to be medium level since the only things you need to focus on is Coding (Data structures, Algorithms and basic Maths). This is actually a subset of Amazon and other FAANG/MAANG interview preparation. You can checkout my post for Amazon interview experience here: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2297388/amazon-india-sde2-july-2022-selected-offer/1500956

Interview Process: 1 Screening + 3 technical rounds + 1 Googliness round(HR round, team fit etc)

Screening round (Coding):

Question: The problem statement was a bit complicated however once you read it, it is really easy. There were a set of records and there was some reponse time given for their delivery on a network. I don't remember the exact statement.
Answer: The problem was to be done with heap and a hashset.

Technical round 1 (Coding):

Question: Given a stream of integers, design a function which can return the number of elements smaller than the current input element.
Answer: I gave the optimal solution using Balanced BST. I implemented it using java treeset. The interviewer was not really happy with me using java treeset and wanted me to to write pseudo code for my own BST. I did write the function for my own BST.
Feedback: Hire

Technical round 2 (Coding) :
Question: The problem statement was a bit complicated but it all comes down to finding the
minimum distance between two points on a 2d array and printing the path. No diagonal movement is allowed.
Like : (0,0)-> (0,1)->(1,1)

Answer: The problem comes down to calculating the manhattan distance path between two points. I gave the solution and the interviewer seemed happy.

Feedback: Hire

I had already decided to join Amazon:
Prior to my round 3, I had already decided to join Amazon due to the following reasons:

• I had already cracked Amazon interviews and had received the offer from them as well. The Amazon recruiter was also very professional and shared all my feedbacks with me properly. They were quick in handing out the offer (in less than a week) to me once I had made it past the interviews successfully.
• I was aware of the fact that Google L4 compensation offered in India is less than Amazon SDE2. Google base for L4 is around 35LPA only which is way less than Amazon.
• I was aware of the fact that Google can take many weeks or even months to confirm on your hiring even if all your rounds were positive.
• Google hiring freeze was going on when I was being interviewed. Maybe, that was the reason that the Google recruiter did not reach out to me much. I had to call her myself to get my own feedback. Many of her statements were contradicting as well which I did not like.

Technical round 3 (Coding) :
Question : The question was similar to this https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-path-in-a-grid-with-obstacles-elimination/. We just had to tell that if a path is possible or not.
Answer: I easily did it using BFS approach.

Feedback : Strong hire

Post Interview:
As usual, I had to call my recruiter myself to ask about my feedback. She had many contradicting statements again. She could have directly told me about the hiring freeze. I already was aware of it.
Prior to the scheduling the Googliness round, she told me that the hiring confirmation might take a couple of weeks as the final decision totally depends on the hiring committee.
Based on further discussions, we decided to call it off and not proceed ahead with the process as I had already decided to join Amazon.

Suggestions:

• You might be offered Google L3 poisition inspite of your 3+ yrs of experience. But, please don't fall into that trap as you will step back in your career. I have a few friends who took that decision and none of them is happy. The compensation for L3 is around 22-25LPA. I was clear from the start and told them that I would not take anything below L4.
• Make sure to apply in other companies as well even if Google is your dream company. Google's hiring confirmation can take some time and you can be rejected even if you perform great.
• Though Google will only ask you coding questions, I suggest you to study LLD, HLD as well because at this point of your career you should be well aware of it and every other big company will ask you this. Google preparation must be a subset of your overall preparation.

Amazon interview Experience
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2297388/amazon-india-sde2-july-2022-selected-offer/1500956