Hi all,
sharing my interview experience with Google.

Applied on googles career website on in Feb 20th and recruiter reached out for phone screen.

1. Phone screen:

• asked to write a simple library management program,
• discussed some linkedlist + segment tree + lazy update
• Interviewe said just keep it simple and made me code the naive approach
• focussed on edge cases, clean code, communication and time complexity
• verdict: SH

2. Onsite

a)Code the simple tetris game

• Coded it and went ahead with the naive approach
• interviewer couldnt understand me (communication barrier)
• verdict: LNH

b) Number of ways to partition an array into segments s.t each segment has atleast 2 negative numbers

• Started with brute force
• created a optimized N^2 dp based approach
• discussed the O(N) approach as follow up
• verdict: SH

c) Given a dictionary of words, find how many of them have a given 'key' as prefix.

• came up with a trie based approach
• answered follow ups quickly had extra 10mins
• verdict: SH

d) Googleyness:

-idr

Overall: Cleared onsite waiting for HM round.

Tips:

• Remember they arent going to run your code, so dont worry so much about bugs/syntax errors
• solving problem quickly and optimally is priority#1
• communication, edge cases, clarifying questions, code quality, dry runs are priority#2
• always expect a follow up so finish your questions within 20-25 mins (medium, hard lc problems)