I would like to share my experience of Google Onsite. Although I enjoyed the process, but the feedback I received is pretty much unreasonable. I will share the feedback at the end.
Phone Screen
Print 2-D array using only 1 for loop
Find top K elements - if given inut is 1 trillion numbers
Cleared Phone Screen, scheduled onsite in a span of 2 days.
Virtual Onsite
Round 1:
Find the median in an array
Solution: Discussed Selection sort mechanism to chose pivot and iteratively use binary search to discard left half and right half. The solution was optimal and wrote working code with the test cases.
Given data is present in 1000 machines, how will you find a median in this case?
Solution: This was suppose to be a discussion just to check my thought process. I tried to come up with some approaches.
Round 2
This was the perfect interview according to me:
Find Number of Islands: standard leetcode problem, solved in 7-8 mins
Find Distinct Number of Islands : again a standard Leetcode problem, solved within 10 mins
Interviewer was out of questions as 2 questions is the limit. But still I was asked 1 more question at the end, variation of Islands problem again, I solved it in 10 mins and time was up by then.
Round 3
- Multiply base 3 numbers
- Two Sum
This interview was again a perfect interview, I gave a working solution of both the questions and I felt interviewer was convinced by my solutions, the solutions were optimal.
Round 4
- Guess the word variation: Again a standard Leetcode Hard. I solved it within 20 mins. we discussed various tradeoffs as well.
As a follow up interviewer added a condition, [2,1,7,2,3] - for ex, if we have a given array like the one mentioned, were word has "0" character matches with 2 words in dictionary, 1 character match in 1 word in dict, 2 characters match with 7 words in dict and so on, will this help to further optimize your solution. I was trying to think but we had less time left and this was just to check my thought process. I thought there might be some tradeoffs chosing how to use that info to optimize it further. Any thoughts will be appreciated. But overall, I think pretty well given that I solved the problem on time.
Round 5
Googleyness: I aced this interview, I got strong positive feedback for this one. We discussed about professional achivements, any issues I worked on since last 1 year. This round was awesome.
Feedback:
I got the feedback after a week:
Round 1 feedback: I took some time to write prod level code and was not able to come up with valid solution for second question
Round 2 feedback: I didn't check the correctness in code and was having difficulty using dfs approach ( which I felt was wrong)
Round 3 feedback: Again the same, I was able to come up with the solution, but not able to solve second one. also, recruiter constantly mentioned, "efficacy - the ability to produce a desired or intended result" (was missing)
I took ony 2-3 mins to solve 2 Sum problem, not sure what they want....
Round 4 feedback: Again, solved the first one with optimized solution, but was struggling to come up with optimized approach for the second question. ( Dear Googlers, we only have 45 mins for god sake, I already solved 2 parts of the problem which I thought was more than enough given we only get 35 mins..... )
Round 5 feedback: It was perfect and got Strong Hire (SH) for this one.
I am not sure what are they looking for. how could they expect to solve 2 Leetcode Hards in span of 35 mins? I know many will disagree, but I thought I did pretty well in the interviews. I was confident to get atleast 3 SH and may be 1 LH. But as per the feedback, none of them gave me a SH. I am devastated because it seems they were not looking into any positives but they were very only looking for one negative and boom, NO HIRE!!!! If this is how they chose candidates, then I am better off working for a small company.
No Grudges against anyone, just venting my feelings out!!!!!
Thanks