Hello, I just wanted to thank the community for all the information it provides, truly valuable!

I had my onsites a little more than a month ago for Google Zurich. It was the second time I had them, first being on March 2022. I would like to share my experiences and give back, since I found others experiences being very helpful for my preparation.

For starters I have a 5 year MEng ECE degree from the best school of my country (not stating this to brag, just plain info, and I do believe it does not matter what uni you come from for the most part, your effort is a lot more important) and I am now almost finished with my two year MSc in DS & ML. I had never interviewed before, nor had any work or competitive programming experience.

Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn on January 2022, I had my phone screen on February. Never leetcoded before, so I started practicing every day. Went amazing, it was a pretty easy problem and the interviewer was a very cool & chill guy, which honestly I think matters a lot. I had my on-sites on March. Four coding, one behavioral. Two of the coding rounds went good, two not good. Recruiter had mentioned that i can bomb one out of four rounds and I'd pass.

1: Binary Search like koko eating bananas or smt (coded everything)
2: Backtracking with a simple math function to implement (the follow up code was not clean & im sure had bugs)
3: Meeting Rooms. I hadn't prepared that good, just 1.5 month of lc, so I didn't do it right. Bomb.
4. It was a French interviewer, who did not speak clearly and her connection was bad. Bombed the round. I remember being very tired after 5 hours of interviewing (including the break) and couldnt even code the first question. It was a tree traversal algorithm of a dictionary of dictionaries, that you had to create given a file as some text. So you needed to use some string methods that the interviewer wanted me to know. Honestly it was not hard, I was just out of it.
5. Behavioral was okay, nothing interesting.

Overall I knew I hadn't pass, 10 days after I got mixed feedback, recruiter said i couldn't go to team match and a week later HC reject.

Fast forward, July recruiter reaches out, I schedule on-sites a month later, at the beginning of August. I had 3 coding rounds this time, 1 behavioral. I split the rounds in two days. I practiced using Neetcode, an amazing guy. I solved all Neetcode 150 questions. I felt that I could code cleaner and do harder questions easier, so I was more confident. In general I am not an anxious person, I know that with practice I can do anything. Honestly, the interviews were easier than the first time. Maybe I had become a bit better at coding lc too, idk. So:

1: Implement a class of a restaurant waiting system. Used queues. Forgot a return in a function, but the interviewer asked about it after, and was happy I saw it, he did not let me write it though.
2: Implement a class of smt that needed heaps and taking the smallest number. I do not remember the question exactly, but the heaps tab at neetcode was more than enough. It has some questions with the same logic. Coded everything. I did a mistake on the complexity, because i literally did not see a line from my nerves probably, I was a bit annoyed after because it was so easy and I knew it.
3: It was a very easy question, coded it in 5-10 minutes, the interviewer cared more about the memory optimization and asked some questions about what would i do if the input did not fit in memory etc. Answered everything correctly, the guy was a good one.
4 (Behavioral): Best interview ever. We had such a good time chatting, I was honest, spoke from my experiences and heart and we had good conversations. The guy was chill and very polite and funny.

Overall I felt good about my performance, even though it was not perfect. I got an update today that "your interview feedback is ok, congratulations". I was confused with the "ok", but I guess it passes the bar, even though it's not good good? idk, if you have any input I would appreciate it.

Recruiter told me that the hiring is paused for now, that my results are valid for a year and that we will continue my application, once hiring picks back up.

I would like to ask if you think that the hiring will indeed pick back up again for us that are on freeze in the future? I do not mind, I am not in a rush, and I know nobody knows, but I guess I want to see what you guys think, based on similar past events.

Closing, my advice is to start leetcoding as soon as possible, so you dont have to cram. It will help your brain know more stuff. Sleep, do not exhaust yourself. The second time I was interviewing, I still went out with my friends and did other stuff too, like go to the beach etc. Neetcode is amazing, he is underrated. Without him I wouldn't have done as well. Also, try to split your interviews so that you can be rested!

Thank you for reading this, bye!:)