Location: Bangalore
Total Experience : Exactly 1 year as of day of post :)
Applied on Google Careers Portal and recruiter reached out to schdule a call a week later. This was sometime in end of April.
Round : Recruiter screen
A few standard data structure questions, said we could move forward to phone sceen. All the questions in that were asked are available in these links.
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/307661/google-initial-phone-screen-with-recruiter
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1133071/Google-Initial-Phone-Screen-Interview-Questions/
Scheduled phone screen for June as I wanted to take time to prepare.
--Good News--
Interviews are no longer on Google docs, Google has a new editor that has syntax highlighting and proper auto indendation in which the coding happens.
--Bad News--
There's a high chance that urls get mixed up and the interviewer and you have different urls for an interview. When this happens, interviewers switch to a google doc and ask you to code on that. Sigh. ¯\_(ツ)/¯ .
*Based on my experience over 4 rounds you have a 50% chance to get to code on the awesome new much awaited feature rich editor. *
Round : Phone Screen
I wrote a post right after this took place. Here you go : https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2245766/google-phone-screen-l3-june-2022/
I think I would give myself a Hire here.
I was invited for a set of onsite interviews and had it scheduled for August. I initially thought to take it in September but decided to shift it forward hearing about hiring freeze. Silly me was thinking I'll sneak in before the actual freeze comes into effect. Super smart!! The rounds were scheduled over 4 days.
Round : Onsite 1 - Technical
TCP Stream - https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2483532/Google-or-Onsite-or-TCP-Stream
I couldnt find a good clear link to this question anywhere on leetcode, so I wrote it up as detailed as I could. I dont think this round went very good. Optimistic case a Lean No Hire
Round : Onsite 2 - Technical
Ditto this question : https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-cost-for-tickets/
Lol, even the wording is exactly the same. Alas, I hadn't seen this question before. So I talked through the bruteforce approach and interviewer asked me to code that out because he might have felt that I wouldn't be able to come up with DP right away. So to have something on the doc, he asked me to code this. I coded it up, but missed one edge case, pretty sure I lost points there. After that he asked me to optimize it and I came up with DP solution and coded that out as well. Jotted down the time complexity and wrapped the round late by 2 mins. I think he was expecting to do 2 questions in this round, he hinted towards something like that in the beginning, so I guess I fell short here.
Best case Hire if it was indeed a 1Q round, more realistically Lean hire
Round : Onsite 3 - Behavioural
- Conflict with manager - what are the points you presented to justify your case.
- If you were in a situation where you have to ship a critical feature which is code complete and working but of less code quality, what would you do?
- What difference do you see yourself in the past 1 year?
- Tell me about a time when work was criticized
- What are the key factors you would look for when you decide to take up a new project?
Interviewer was basically just interested in bullet point answers that she could note down as feedback and not necessarily into the awesome stories I wanted to tell her. I figured that out after the 2nd question and oblidged.
This round was done in less than half and hour, talked about the' interviewers work for maybe 5 minutes and ended early. She told me she hopes I make it through. Not sure if she meant it though. Her camera was off and was probably chilling somewhere outside. The background noise and partly my imagination tells me Goa, but who knows maybe it's Pondicherry ( Note to international readers - Goa and Pondicherry are two places in India with really dope beaches - Come visit!!)
I would give myself a Hire but optimistically lets take it as Strong Hire.
Round : Onsite 4 - Technical
Exact same question as this : https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2328651/Google-Phone-Interview-Question
I coded out the optimal solution in almost 25-30 mins and he seemed to be satisfied. Then he was mostly interested in discussing how I would handle various kinds of errors that could come up due to invalid string being passed in - throw exceptions or custom error messages or standard error messages etc. In his words he wanted a 'philosophical discussion' regarding error handling. I personally love this guy, he seemed super awesome and fun. After the 'philosophical discussion', ended up chatting for 5-10 mins before ending the round.
Hire, but I really hope he gives me a Strong Hire
I'm probably not gonna make it. Dont get carried away by my optimistic predictions.
Words of wisdom (AKA Rant) - I had about 300 LC done before my onsites - 200 Medium, 50 Hard, 50 Easy. To crack google interviews, my advice is to buy LC premium and start doing all the google tagged questions. Parallely go through the discuss section regularly and thourougly reading any and every google tagged post with questions - solve them and keep the solution somewhere with you or better post it as a comment. Someone should actually aggregate and track all these google posts. It would take maybe 6 months to cover all these. Then I am pretty much sure, that google would suprise you with the exact same question. In the rare case, you are hit with a new question - count yourself unlucky but do everyone else a favour and create a post here with it.
BTW, did I mention I also failed an Apple interview recently - you can find that here : https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2432962/Apple-or-Onsite-or-London-or-Reject.
Also I have no idea why I spent so much time writing up all this on Leetcode. Guess it gives a sense of closure. I only have Amazon left to fail and then I can get back to learning actual developement work for 6 months before I get a new dose of FOMO and circle back to Leetcode.