Preface
Hey guys, wanted to give back to this community which has helped me so much over the past 3 years. I started my full time job hunt in September 2019 for a new grad position in 2020. I interviewed with serveral companies, some successful others not. Wanted to share my particular experience with Google which was quite long overall (7 months). I've interviewed with google twice for internship positions and was on the wrong side of it both times. This time around as well for new grad, but got extremely close to clearing it. I cannot reveal specifics about the questions themselves due to NDA, sorry!

Phone screen (45 mins)

One of my weirdest google phone interviews. Interviewer was not prepared and arrived 5 minutes late which left us with 40 minutes for the interview.

1. Warm up array question [Leetcode Easy]. Finished this in about 10 minutes.
2. Significantly harder adhoc grid question which involved binary search. Took me a while to clarify any specifics and had about 12 mins for implementation. Got to something in the end, but definitely not code complete. Had a few loose ends for sure.

For some reason, the interviewer left 8 minutes at the end for question about his role and the company. He was definitely unprepared imo as generally its 3-4 minutes at the end. He concluded the interview 2 minutes early, so efffectively we only had 38 minutes for this interview. Anyhow, I cleared this to my surprise and made it onsite.

Onsite 1 (5 x 45 mins)

1. [Leetcode Medium] Array based question which had two parts. I think I did reasonably well here but didn't have enough time to run through test cases for the follow up. The interviewer was very shy and didn't seem to talk much.

2. [Leetcode Easy-Medium] This was a geometry based question which seemed hard at first but turned out to be easy-ish. Implementation was a bit messy on whiteboard but I think this round went well.

3. [Leetcode Medium] Interviewer was unprepared here and I was asked a weird geometry question again. I did very well in this round and we had enough time for follow up questions and discussions.

4. [Leetcode Medium-Hard] After the warm up question, this round was a lot more open ended and we had to design some kind of text editor with a few constraints. A lot of this round was about talking about your thought process and discussing various approaches.

5. [Googlyness] This was like any other behavioral round where the interviewer goes through a standard checklist.

Recruiter got back after 2-3 weeks requesting 2 additional rounds mostly focused on algorithms. Due to the covid-19 situation, this was conducted virtually.

Onsite 2 (2 x 45 mins)

1. [Leetcode Medium-Hard] Interviewer was again 5 minutes late here. Got asked an interval binary search question and then a hard follow up with only 20 mins remaining. Was next to impossible to find a working solution given the time constraints. Although, I got to something in the end, it was probably not enough.

2. [Leetcode Medium-Hard] BFS/DFS grid with land/water kind of question (not your typical find # of islands question). Got to the solution with no hints except for one detail which was pointed out to me (forgot to pop off from the queue in my BFS function). Testing was extremely hard on google docs and I believe this is where I lost a few points. It was hard to trace out the steps of the BFS on Docs.

Got the news that HC did not get enough signal on algorithms/data structures. I think I got very close, but I have no idea why HC thinks this especially after I managed to figure out the algorithms for almost all my rounds.

To anyone interviewing with Google, I'd say that a LOT of it is random noise. Your interviewers might be late, your interviewer might forget their questions, or you might have to do 3 rounds on Google Docs which is a bad experience. Always remember Googlers really care about your thought process. You need to verbalize your arguments properly to stand a good chance.

I'm fortunate to have received offers from other places, so I'll list down what I did over the past 7-8 months:

• Did Leetcode contests weekly (follow up with looking at solutions and attempting unsolved questions)
• Identifying weak points and looking at specific problems in that area (like Graphs for eg). ALWAYS look at the 'Discuss' tab for better insights. I have learnt countless techniques through the Discuss tab.
• A week before the interview, I set 15 minute timers for Easy-Medium questions and 25 minute timers for Hard questions. You have limited time so you need to cover as much topics as you can and get into the zone.
• Used pen and paper to sketch out ideas. Trust me, this works.
• Talked to myself while thinking of problems (not as often as I should have, though). I think this can really improve your thoughtprocess.
• Got into the "gratefulness" mindset. I hardly even expected a Google onsite. I was treating every round from then on as a "bonus". It sucks to not have cleared it (for the 3rd time in my life :/ ) but at the end of the day, I had a great experience and I am super grateful for that.