Hello All,

A Google Recruiter reached out to me on 27th Nov 2023. Gave me time for prep of Dec 2023. Due to Holidays in dec, got the connect call for scheduling interviews on 8th Jan 2024. Told them to schedule it on 29th Jan 2024. Overall, I had around 2 months time to prep but, while working as a full time SDE as well. My Current YOE is 1.5yrs

Can't disclose question due to confidentaility. Have to keep it under wraps.

Preliminary Round (Eliminatory) - 29th Jan 2024 :

Question: A Sliding Window Problem - Basically had to tell the max size of window in the array (elements can be any Integer (-ve, 0, +ve)). Condition was that the sum of the elements cannot go -ve. The element which made the sum 0 we don't have to count that element. We have to find max size of window this way.

My Experience: Interviewer told me there would be 1 question asked. He explained me the question and gave some examples. Obviously at the time of interview, the language of question did not hint me towards this approach. I got caught up in the language of the question adn the way it was framed and started to think of some brute force approach which came out to be O(n^2) (Trying all windows).
In my Opinion, this was a pretty easy problem tbh but due to my lack of problem solving skills (which took a hit due to not practising DSA problem solving as I am wokring Full Time), I was not able to tackle such an easy problem.

In my 2 months prep, I covered a ton of topics which were frequently asked in google like BFS, DFS, TopoSort, Dijkstra's, BellmanFord, Prims, Kruskals, Disjoint Set, Union-Find, Recursion, Backtracking, Memoization, Tabular, Space Optimisation. But I think where I failed was I just understood the advance topics very well and did 5-6 question on each topic. But, I did not practice simpler concepts like Sliding Window, 2 Pointer, Standard Array and String Problems, etc. And I approached the prep like I was giving a college Exam, where your memorize everything just before exams. Due to this approach and mindset, my mind got blank on the day of interview as I learned a lot of things in small time and did not practice Randomness in problems which actually develop problem solving skills.

Result - Reject.
Recruiter connected with me the next day and told me that the feedback in not positive and told me what interviewer wrote down for me.

Next Steps - Focusing on practicing my problem solving skills. Gaining more exp. in industry and focusing on learning industry level skills which are hot in market and in demand. Targetting for switch in next 6 months now.