A recruiter had reached out to me on LinkedIn. I responded.
After the initial recruiter screen, She asked me for my availability for a Technical Phone Screen.
The Phone Screen
It was 45mins long and all coding. The question was pretty generic, Merge two arrays and few follow ups on my Divide and Conquer approah.
I got a response back from Google in around 5 days. A new recruiter then reached out to me with alal the details around what to expect out of the Onsite along with asking about my availability.
There was also a 60 to 90 minute long session, scheduled for anyone going into the Onsite loops.
This was the first such session, and I feel very useful.
It was Hangouts session, lead by one Senior Engineer, who told us that he had conducted over 120 candidate, discussing what the usual format is like and a mock question. The question was super vague (intentionally so). So, he prompted us to ask more relevant questions, suggesting that a real Google interview would be like this and if you can crack it in 40-45mins, that means that the interviewer did not do a good job.
Day of the Interview
Later on the day of my onsite, I arrived few minutes early, checked in Building D, Google Kirkland office. My first interviewer arrived, printed my badge, receptionist handed him over a Chromebook.
He was super kind and walked me around the building, showed me the workspaces. The whole experience gave me those I-am-at-Google feels!
Walked into the first interview room:
- Given a multi dimensional array of integers, sort the arrays and also remove duplicates
- https://leetcode.com/problems/guess-the-word The lengths of the words had been limited to 4. Though I could not not solve it without a couple of hints. I really enjoyed the process of trying to find a solution for this.
Then the Lunch Round, no technical questions here. One Engineer asked me about my food prefernces and took me to a cafe. I have worked in offices that have awesome cafeterias and employee foodcourts, sos this did not impress me as much (this in no way matters, just felt like sharing, that is it :D) No technical questions here. The interviewer tried to ensure I cool down and get ready for the next rounds.
Once done the lunch time interviewer walked me to my next interview room, aslso showing and explaining about the building and people ass much as possible.
Rest of the rounds:
- Remove alternate nodes on a doubly linked list
- Shortest path of how a knight moves on an Infinite chess board
- For anyone interested, here is an detailed analysis of the problem: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/104700/minimum-number-of-moves-to-reach-a-cell-in-a-chessboard-by-a-knight
- Given points in a Cartesian plane, find two points such that the mid point is also an integer with O(k) or less complexity
The problems were well framed and were followed up with technically challenging questions.
One done, another person wass waiting outside for me, she walked me to the reception.
Few things, I learned:
- Always be prepared for few glitches and delays
- Carry your own set of markers
- There might be interviewers, you might not be able to understand, be it language or accent or any other aspect, do not hesitate in asking them to repeat. The end goal is for you to be able to solve the problem
- Always check if your recruiter has your most recent resume. In my case the interwiers were given my old resume and that clearly missed my last one year's work
- Enjoy the process, I know it is easier said than done, but that will help drain you less