Hi,
I recently interviewed with Google for SWE III position(L4).
My friend referred me in the month of November 2023 and I applied in 3 openings using that.
All the 3 applications got rejected. (Felt very disappointed😢).
He again referred me in December 2023 and again I applied for 3 different roles to increase my chances of getting shortlisted. Again due to bad luck, all the 3 applications got rejected.
As google cant allow for submitting more than 3 applications within 30 days, I again had to wait for Januaury month.
Again I applied on 3 different roles and this time one of the application got accepted and hence got the call from the recuiter on 23rd Jan.
She told me about the process of Google interview and helped me with the useful resources for preparation. I was very happy as this is my dream company.
She gave me 4 weeks of time to get prepared and brush up on the data structures and algorithms.
My phone screening round was scheduled on 19th Feb.
In this round, I was asked one question based on 2 pointers. I would rate this problem as LC medium. I was able to solve the problem and its foloow ups withtin 45 mins.
I got Hire in this round.
Then my 3 onsite rounds were scheduled.
Round 1 - The question was based on sorting, greedy, map. This was simple question but implementation was little bit time consuming. I was able to solve the follow up question of this.
I got Hire in this round.
Round 2 - The question was based on priority queue, sorting and greedy. I was able to solve the problem and its follow up. I would rate it LC medium.
I got Hire in this round.
Round 3 - The question was based on simple bfs. Nothing hard in the question and can be easily solved. But the question was given vaguely and no input and schema was given. This was more for discussion.
I got Leaning Hire in this round. Although I think this was the easiest question.
Round 4 - Googlyness round.
I got Strong Hire in this round.
Recruiter scheduled fit calls with 2 teams within a week. With first team 2 rounds were scheduled and with second team only 1 round was scheduled. Both the teams were ready to give me offer but I wanted to get more clarity on first team so I asked for another fit call with first team.
After accepting the first team, it took around 2-3 weeks to get the offer letter.
I was doing DSA since october and have solved many leetcode medium and hard problems.
Keep these things in mind for Google interview -
- They will not extend the interview by a minute over 45 minutes duration. So keep your introduction short and leave time for follow ups.
- First start with brute force solution but dont jump directly to code it. Discuss optimal approach and then code it.
- Practice atleast 4-5 leetcode medium problems every day for 3-4 months straight without any fail.
- Important topics - Array, Linked list, Graph, Trees, String manipulatoin and DP.
- Write clean and readable code and dont overkill the problem with heavy datastructures.
Here is the post about the compensation - https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/5004170/Google-L4-SWE-for-bangalore