Google L3/L4 Interview [Failed]
Anonymous User
1384
Feb 06, 2021
Feb 15, 2021

Phone Screen:

Leetcode Hard, BFS Graph problem

Virutal On-Site:

Interview 1 : Coding

Distributed Systems BFS problem. Not Leetcode style, represented more of a real world problem. I thought the question was kind of fun and wasn't hard but the class interface and functions tripped me up. I knew how to solve it but I had trouble with wrapping my head around the implementation details. I ended up finishing the problem, but with lots of direction from the interviewer. I felt like I did very poorly on this just because of the help I had to get.

I'd rate my perforamnce on this a 1.5/5

Interview 2: Coding

Leetcode style problem. Boiled down to loop detection, dictionary data structure problem. I was still distracted from the poor performance of my first interview, I ended up chosing an inefficient datastructure (not a dict) for this because of the question wording. I interpreted the whole question as an object oriented design problem and solved it as such. Only got to the root of the algorithmic section at the end. I was pretty disappointed in my performance of this question too. I did better than the first question though.

I'd rate my performance as a 3/5

Interview 3: Coding

DFS + Substring problem. Did much better on this one, though the interviewer gave me a pretty large hint prematurely. I was just about to come to that conclusion before he gave me a hint, I feel like this will reflect poorly on my performance in this interview. I ended up talking about a bunch of test cases for this question, I didn't write any code for these test cases but I covered most edge and corner cases. I think I got the most optimal or near most optimal performance out of this as well.

I'd rate my performance as 4/5

Interview 4: Coding

Logically complex problem, not leetcode. Nothing like I've seen before. I came up with a pretty clever (n/2)^2 algorithm. I think I could have optimized it a little bit more but the interviewer didn't seem interested in this since the function wasn't going to be run more than once in a while and the max N would be would be about 50. I wrote a couple tests. One in particular the interviewer commented on how he liked my test approach.

I'd rate my performance as 5/5

Interview 5: Behavioral

Standard behavioral, this one went fantastic. I really connected with my interviwer and was able to come up with some fantastic examples for the questions asked. Prepping for Amazon LP questions really helped here

I'd rate my performance as 5/5

Summary

Out of the 5 interviws, if I were to evaluate myself yes/no/maybe decisions (no hire, lean no hire, lean hire, hire) I'd say [no hire, lean no hire, lean hire, hire, hire] for each of the interviews. I'll be getting feedback from my recruiter on the results in two days, I'll update this post on what happens.

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