Hi all

I was approached by a recruiter via Linkedin regarding some L5 position at Google Munich. We agreed on scheduling a phone coding interview in 3 weeks.

Interview day: the interviewer was a nice guy, we generally had a nice discussion and he asked one question (sorry can not tell) but it was an easy Maths problem.
I was able to find the brute force solution myself and with the help of some hints from the interview, I managed to find the linear time solution and wrote the code for both solutions as it was not that much of code.

3 days later: the recruiter emailed me saying they can not move forward with me with no specific reasons but mentioning that I can apply again in 6 months.

Notes and learnings:

• The coding interview is no longer on Google Doc, there is another text tool that has some syntax highlighting.

• do not just focus on the common topics like graph, trees, string,... etc but also Maths questions are still important.

• clearly communicate your ideas with the interviewer because they really want to help either by unblocking you or steer you away from a wrong direction.

• It seems to me Google is actually slowing down the hiring till end of year and maybe only hiring very much needed positions or people with outstanding performance as I do not see any reason to get rejected but “we can not move forward at this point of time”.