Going to respect the NDA and not talk about the specifics of the problems

• Over one year of experience
• By the time I got to the virtual onsite I did 290ish problems
• I applied for the Irvine Office through a recruiter
• First time interviewing with Google or any FANG company

Timeline

• Started talking to a recruiter around early March
• Got my phone interview at March 30th
• Got my Virtual Onsite at Apirl 13th
• Hiring Committee Response at April 27th

Phone Interview

The problem that I was given is a medium Leetcode problem that involves using breath first-search to solve the problem. This interview went very well for me. Able to communicate a good understanding of the problem and was able to explain my solution very clearly. I made an effort to make my code clean and as clear as possible. Got a response the next day that I'll be moving to an onsite. The problem can be found on Google's top Interview question on Leetcode.

Virtual Onsite

Note: If you're doing a virtual onsite, use your phone for Google handouts and have phone connected to wifi. Makes it easier.

• Behavioural Interview - This interview is pretty straightforward. Talked about teams I was part of, the projects I worked on and how I add value to the teams.

• Coding Interview 1 - Easy / Medium problem. Creating multiple functions that are tied to each other. Testing on the pros and cons of each approach you to come up with and deciding what function will get priority in terms of time and space complexity.

• Coding Inteview 2 - Medium / Hard problem. This is where I screwed up. Panicked when trying to figure out the problem, and came up with an approach that ends up confusing me for a good 30 minutes before I got my bearings. Came up with a less than optimal solution for the problem.

• Hour Lunch Break - I didn't eat lunch, it's virtual onsite

• Coding Interview 3 - Medium problem. The problem wasn't too bad, testing basic understanding of binary trees and ways to manipulate it. Problem can be found on Google's top interview questions on Leetcode.

• Coding Interview 4 - Medium problem. The given problem can be solved using hashmaps. The problem wasn't too hard but my mistake was jumping into coding too soon before thinking about the problem deeply enough with the interviewer. Also, another problem that can be found on Google's top interview questions on Leetcode.

The recruiter told me a week later that onsite interview was split but overall positive so good enough to go to the hiring committee. On the day of the hiring committee's assessment, I got a call from my recruiter that I won't be moving forward. My strengths being able to write clean and concise code and able to have a good back and forth the interviewer and taking their input seriously. My weakness, tend to jump into coding and not thinking about the problem too deeply and having a hard time catching small mistakes during the interview.

Resources in no particular order

• Behavioural Interview Interview
• Clément Mihailescu
• Errichto
• Back To Back SWE
• Interview Cake
• Dynamic Programming
• Coding Questions Patterns

Tips if you value mines lol

• Find the optimal solution for all problem including the easy problems. Take the time to look at the solutions in the discussions and find the cleanest / intuitive solution that's optimal and understand it.
• Don't jump into coding like I did, make sure have a pen and paper out and play with the problem if you're doing it virtually. Physical onsite use the white board to get good visual of the problem.
• Have fun with it and make sure talk with the interviewer. Everyone I interacted with was pretty casual and easy to talk to. Putting too much pressure on yourself is not the way to go and will mess you up.
• Pratice interviewing with people, either online or with a friend. Do like 5-10 of those with different types of questions to the hang of it.
• 45 minutes is enough to solve these problem so don't worry. Take your time and pace yourself.

Good Luck