Google Interview Questions:

Recruiter’s Email: October 19, 2024

• Interview 1 (November 6, 2024):

Obtain the inorder predecessor and successor in a binary search tree. Follow up: without using extra memory

Self-evaluation: Hire

Took some time to modify the binary tree for parent pointers, hence not a strong hire, but did successfully code both question and follow-up within 35 minutes.

• Interview 2 (November 29, 2024, interviewer didn’t show up, rescheduled to December 6, 2024):

Given an array, return the largest subarray that is a special arithmetic sequence.

Self-evaluation: Hire

Managed to code the solution using a two-pointer approach in around 45 minutes.

• Interview 3 (January 15, 2025):

A graph-based question. Alice and Bob are two friends in two cities. They want to go to a destination city, and they are open to cab sharing after meeting in a common city. Return the minimum cost of their travel.

Self-evaluation: Strong Hire

Used multi-source BFS with hashmaps for optimisation. Interviewer was positive and impressed. G&L round here also went very well, it was a light-hearted and fun discussion.

• Interview 4 (January 15, 2025):

We have been given a file with IP Addresses and their respective locations. We have also been given a query IP address, for which we need to obtain the location. Return the city to which the IP belongs. Follow up: instead of a single query, there are multiple queries in an array.

Self-evaluation: Lean No Hire

Took a bad turn into tries when followed up with multiple queries. Did code the optimal binary search approach, but was a little tensed, hence made small mistakes that I corrected under the time limit without any hints from the interviewer. The interviewer was a bit non-communicative, so the G&L round felt like a quiz with pre-meditated questions.

Additional rounds:

• Interview 5 (February 19, 2025):

We have been given a file that has chat logs between people. We need to obtain the top n talkative users, where the most talkative user is the user with the highest count of words. Follow up was given by amending the file structure.

Self-evaluation: Strong Hire

Coded the entire solution using heap within 30 minutes. Initial code was dynamic in nature so the follow-up was already addressed in my solution. Interviewer was impressed, hence had an informal and friendly discussion for the remaining 15 minutes.

• Interview 6 (February 19, 2025):

We have been given two arrays of two classes - Apartments (flat_number, no_of_bedrooms) and People(name, preference). There are people who prefer a single bedroom apartment (preference = False), and there are people who prefer having housemates : multiple bedroom apartments (preference = True). We need to prioritise preference of the people, but ensure that as many people are housed as possible.

Self-evaluation: Strong Hire 

Coded the initial solution in 35 minutes using heaps, interviewer was impressed with the code quality and clarity. Told me to expect a positive response from the recruiter soon.

Situation today:
They have told me to wait for a decision. The overall interview feedback is good, but apparently the hiring decisions for the 2025 batch are currently staggerred so it might take them till mid-June to deliver a concrete response.