I recently gave the interview at google for L3/L4 and i would like to share the same in leetcode community.
First Round -
q1 ) A binary tree is given, return all the leaf node of the binary tree with the maximum value from root to leaf node in the path. (It was pretty easy problem and i solved it in time by simply traversing the tree in pre-order fashion )
q2) -
You have a dictionary of string, example - [string, sring, sing, wording, ing,ng, g]
You need to tell the maximum longest word in the dictionary that is valid.
Definiton of valid string , if you remove only one character from the string and it should be in the dictionary and by doing so if you able to reach at the end with length as 1, it will be valid.
Example - ( string-> sring->sing->ing->ng->g) [as all the intermediate string are present in the dictionary this will be a valid string and longest lenght is 6]
I proposed a basic backrtracting solution we explore all the paths, then i tried to think if trie can help in this problem which interviewier told that he hasn't seen any solution related to trie.
After that i added a memorization that if we have already explored a word we wont explore it again. And interviewer seemd fine witht the approach and said to implemented it.
2 nd Interview (Hard problem ) - Exact same question that is here - https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1621880/Google-or-Onsite-or-Maximum-total/1178791
I was able to solve the question with the optimized approach and code it in the given time.
3rd interview (Googlyness) - Interviewer was pretty cool and just asked basic behavorial round question, something tell me about the time when you have conflict wiht co-worker and some sought of these situation based questions.
4th interview experience(I think this is the worst experience i had, added the details in here ) - https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1877175/experience-at-google-l3l4/1321291
As i know i have got a very weird interviewer in my 4 th round, so they down leveld me to L3 and i tried really hard but you can't do anything when it comes to luck and i think google interviews are very much based on luck now days.
Well i didn't take the offer and will try for L4 in 6 months.