After all the hardwork and how helpful leetcode community was for me, I have decided to write this post.
Preparation:
- I started my preparation just when the lockdown started. Google has always been my dream job. I went ahead with the thought that I will give my best shot for it, irrespective of the outcome.
- I prepared 1 month initially, after which I got a call from the recruiter for my first phone screen. It was a simple tree question. I was a little nervous in my first round, missed an edge case which I corrected after the interviewer pointed it out. Later got a call that I cleared first round, but one negative feedback was that I missed an edge case. I later scheduled other 4-5 rounds within next 2 weeks. I screwed up one interview, especially because it was virtual and it was very difficult explaining the interviewer what approach I was thinking and how it would solve the problem.
- I got a call from the recruiter saying that the feedback looks positive and I had 2 team fit calls. One awesome thing about Google is that you get to choose the team. You will have discussions with the managers and you can choose which ever team you are interested in.
- Suprisingly the recruiter called me after 2 weeks saying that the HC requested for 2 additional rounds of interview. When asked for the feedback, the recruiter said that they needed some testing datapoint which was missing from the feedback. I was suprised and was reading about why Google will request for 2 additional rounds. I came across couple of posts where they said that the additional interviews will be very difficult(which is indeed true in my case) and the rejection rate is pretty high in case of technical roles. I didn't let this demotivate me even though I stopped my preparation a month back after givng my last round and I was in a relaxed mode. Instead I decided to give it my best shot and be more focused. The 2 additional rounds were indeed the most difficult ones, but leetcode made them easy for me :) .
- I am waiting for the result which is expected to come this week.
Suggestions:
- You should be really focused and stay motivated. Don't let distractions come your way.
- Give couple of interviews for other companies before you actually give one for your dream job.
- Make a plan - Weekly targets and daily targets
- Make sure that you learn the concepts when you are unable to solve any problem. Retrospection is very important.
- I faced an issue with virtual interviews, especially with tree problems. Make sure that you have some collaboration tools (draw.io) so that you can easily explain it to the interviewer.
Questions: Because of NDA I will not be able to post the exact question. But below are some of the similar questions which were asked:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/populating-next-right-pointers-in-each-node-ii/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-sum-of-two-non-overlapping-subarrays/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/count-complete-tree-nodes/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/house-robber-iii/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/robot-room-cleaner/
I would really like to thank the leetcode community for helping me build strong basics and for proving such an awesome platform to practice.
I will always be greatful for it :) .
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