Hello fellow LeetCoders,
I had my Google on-site rounds recently, and since I've benefited from this community, I want to do my part and share my experience.
I applied for a role on the Google Careers page sometime in September 2024. I had no referrals and I'm not from a tier-1 college. A recruiter responded to the application. I want to let you guys know that Google recruiters generally take a while to respond, so try not to panic when this happens.
Sometime in October, I had a meeting with the recruiter; she wanted to understand my work experience and how good I was at problem solving and DSA styled questions.
My phone screening round was rescheduled and finally happened in November.
Phone screening: A medium intervals question based on line-sweeping. The question was similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-population-year/ with some modifications and a follow-up on space-optimization.
2 days later, I was told I had cleared the screening. My on-sites were scheduled for sometime in December.
On-site 1: A storied graph question on shortest path from source to destination. The follow up added a minor complication. I don't remember the questions exactly; knowing Dijkstra's algorithm would have been enough for both questions.
On-site 2: An n-ary tree traversal + top K elements question. Basically, you had to traverse an n-ary tree and fetch the top K elements based on certain conditions. The question was worded lengthily, so get used to reading long questions and understanding the crux of the problem.
Googliness: Standard behavioural questions. It's very easy to prepare for this round.
On-site 3 was rescheduled multiple times. Once we were in the second half of December, it was difficult to schedule anything. The round finally happened in January.
On-site 3: You're given a number D and a stream of numbers, where you receive one number at a time. Each time you receive a number, you must check if you can form a triplet (a, b, c) with that number and the numbers you already have such that abs(a - b), abs(b - c) and abs(c - a) are all not greater than D. If such a triplet is possible, print it and remove the numbers from future consideration.
It took around 10 days after the final round to get a call from the recruiter saying I'd cleared the interviews. I was already serving notice (I had another offer), and so, they expedited my team-matching process. 2 days after I got confirmation, I had an offer.
I hope this helps you guys. It's a long process with periods of doubt, but try not to let it get to you. I've seen some folks on here think that it's tougher for guys to get interviews (compared to girls); don't let it get to you. I was invited to a doubt clearing session before the interviews, hosted by a Googler, and there were just as many guys as girls in the process. I don't think there is a disparity, personally.
All the best to everyone who has upcoming interviews or is currently in the interview loop!