Google L3 Interview | Europe
Anonymous User
2365

Hi! Some time age a recruiter from Google reached out to me so I started the interview process. I used this site to practice and read all about your experiences so I want to also share mine briefly.

Phone interview: an easy question about tree traversal and a follow-up, that complicated the traversal a bit (had to "delete" nodes one at a time following some special rules). I did stumble a bit, but with the interviewer's help managed to code a final solution.
My rating: LC easy-medium, followup tricky medium, lean hire at best.

I thought I bombed, but the recruiter received generally positive feedback (to my surprise), so I moved on to the "Virtual on-site" interviews.

1: A relatively simple backtracking problem with memoization. Didn't have to solve using tabulation DP (at least that's the impression I got). The interviewer was friendly, but a bit expressionless so I was doubting my every decision and got confused at some points. But in the end I did everything right with a bit of help and answered all questions correctly, though clumsily.
My rating: LC medium at best, lean hire

2: A tricky interval problem. Not hard, but tricky. Input was basically a bunch of overlapping intervals and I had to split them into non-overlapping intervals. Wrote final solution by the end. Interviewer was really friendly, but I had the feeling he had to help me A LOT (to the point of him solving the problem and me just coding it if I exaggerate a bit).
My rating: LC medium, lean hire at best

3: Had to design a data structure for word prediction. Quite a bit of code, but I did it relatively quickly (had to use 2 or 3 hashmaps). Then there was a follow up that complicated things a bit and had to more efficiently save and sort data, then use binary search. Took me a while to arrive to this solution, but I did (by myself) by the end. Ran out of time to write binary search though, but I think the interviewer was satisfied. My best interview IMO.
My rating: LC medium, maybe hard followup, hire

4: Googliness. Not sure about that one. Had a nice talk about mostly hypothetical scenarios "what would I do if...". I was just myself and answered truthfully.

Overall I had a pleasant experience with all my interviewers. Everybody was really nice and friendly. I was able to arrive to the final solution for every problem, but sometimes needed help to do so. Thankfully I never completely "shut down" like some interview prep videos mention. When I was stuck and received a hint, I was generally able to take it and act on it, or at least discuss it. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but sometimes it felt like we were solving the problem "together", like colleagues.

I was surprised at the difficulty of the questions. I don't think I received a single problem that I would classify as "hard" on this site. Just tricky mediums. Maybe I got lucky.

Still waiting for a response. From what I gathered there is currently a hiring freeze anyway so there's probably no need to hurry.

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