I know for the candidates whose interview process are ongoing, its really tough to blindly wait for what-next and when! In this post I will be sharing day wise timeline of the whole process that happened, I am sure this will give a good idea on your interview process ahead.

Day 1: First interaction with recruiter
He briefed me about the interview process and also asked 10 objective type questions. Asked me how much time I need to prepare. I told him, I need some time, so he scheduled next call for to check how my preparation is going.

Day 20: Preparation check by recruiter
Unfortuanerly he informed me that hiring is on hold due to pandemic, but asked me to continue with my preparation and said he will get back to me as soon as he get more information on hiring.

Day 50: Ready for interview
Recruiter asked me five different dates to schedule telephonic interview. Also told me that most of the interviewers are US based, so interviews will be mostly occurring late night.

Day 75: Phone Interview
He asked 3 variants of a simple graph based problem. For each variant it required me to optimize it in a different dimension.

Day 78: Phone Interview Result
Recruiter said I did positively well in the interviews.He also introduced me to the india based recruiter for virtual onsite rounds and said she will be my point of contact for all the further interviews.

Day 84: First mail from Indian recruiter
First mail from the new recruiter, where she scheduled a discussion meeting.

Day 89: Discussion with the recruiter
Again she briefed me about the whole process of onsite interview, hiring committee etc. She also told me that ther will be 5 interviews, 4 problem solving and DS rounds and a googlyness round. Again the problem solving and DS rounds will be by US based interviewers and will be occurring late night. Whereas googlyness round will be conducted with an indian interviewer. She also told me that only 2 coding interviews will happen on a single day. I provided my preferred dates for interviews.

Day 95: First two coding virtual onsite interviews

• Coding Round 1 : He asked a sliding window based problem where size of most optimal window has to be returned. Then we asked modified the problem where I had give 2 window where the size of the 2 window together has to be optimized.

• Coding Round 2: This time the proble was based on pattern matching which requires me to implement Trie.

Day 96: Results for first two rounds
Call from recruiter, results for first 2 rounds were out and she said I did it very well and both the interviewers are inclined to hire.

Day 104: Remaining coding interviews and googlyness round

• Googlyness : Interviewer said all his questions will be situation based, and I can either answer them w.r.t. my past job experience or if that situation never occurred I have to explain if it will occur what will you do.

• Coding round 3: First of all interview didn’t start on time, had to call the recruiter late night as I din’t want to reschedule the interview to some other date. So requested her to reschedule it on the same night for any time slot. My interview the literally occurred at mid night, after round 4. This was also a very simple graph based problem, a bit open ended. The question has some data in beginning which requires preprocessing and then answering the queries. Interviewer then modified the questions a few time and then I had to update my solution accordingly. I also had to make certain written assumptions to solve the problem, which was appreciated by the interviewer.

• Coding round 4: This round had just one problem, based on permutation and combination. I implemented it before time, so interview ended much before the expected time.

Day 105: Results for last three rounds
Got a call from recruiter, she said I did well on these interview as well. She the scheduled a meeting with prospective manager for discussing project.

Day 106: Project Call
Project call meeting with manager on the projects. He told me about the org, what they do. He explained me the projects and the teams he has under him.

Day 113: Package submitted to hiring committee
Recruiter called me and said, manager is inclined to hire me in his team, and now she is submitting my package to hiring committee.

Day 118: Compensation details
Recruiter asked me to share my compensation details including offer letters, payslips etc.

Day 119: Hiring Committe Result
Recruire called me to inform that the Hiring committee approved my package. She also sent me the initial compensation mail. We had a discussion (Negotiation Shhh...!) on that and she said she will talk to compensation team again.

Day 124: Revised Compensation
Recieved revised compensation, matching my requirements.

Day 125: Offer letter
Recieved the official offer letter and accepted the offer!!

Three thing that helped me to reach this point

1. Solved 375 problems on leetcode (75 easy, 200 medium & 100 hard) , also solved a couple of problems daily from different sites.

2. Failing google interview last year. It helped me understand what was missing from my preparation.

3. I am an active interviewer in my current organisation. This helped me understand what are the common mistakes we make as a candidate and also what as an interviewer our expectations are.