Hi EveryOne

I have given this Google interview in April a recruiter approached me and asked slot for Initial Phone screen I asked for a week time and after a week my Initial Phone screen was scheduled

📞 Phone Screen : Big Story the question in short which boils down to
📌 Min Heap of size K must be used to maintain the top K elements
Coded solution and walked through the code.

Feedback Received from recruiter after 10days from phone screen:
--> Candidate solved problem without hints but didnt walk through code untill asked, selected for onsite rounds so asked for a month time for preparation was given 26days.

All 4 Rounds invite was shared -

3 Onsite Rounds (DSA) and 1 Googlyness Round Interviews were scheduled All in same week.

📞 Round 1: Long Story boils down to => Topological Sorting + BFS Question (Straight forward). Difficult Level - Medium
Interviewer was an indian and is not a software engineer she is of some infra team and hadles Automation, looked like she just woke up and sadly she yawned many times while i was answering and switched on and off her camera maultiple times :( and not much supportive despite the problem was very easy to solve, She was not able to understand Topological Sort - Kahns algo why that works when iam coding, she seemed satisfied when i coded the whole and then explained her.

📞Round 2 : Rescheduled as interviewer didnt join, rescheduled to last.

📞Round 3 : With a principal Engineer who joined 3mns late, As soon as he joined he told You look tensed Do u want me to reschedule it despite i was not at all tensed, I was complete chill, and i started feeling tensed as he started with that without Hi How are you
Question : Long story short - Line Sweep Algorithm with intervals Difficulty Level - Medium
I Answered and seemed satisfied with approach and then coded the whole and at 37th minute he told what about duplicates in the interval ranges?
I replied these are the changes needs to be made in the logic to support duplicates then he was like So this required design change .. despite highlighting the changes was on cloud nine expecting everything went well untill he replied that when i was making changes to support duplicates too he told leave it as we may run out of time for questions in last 5mns.

📌 Lesson learnt: Always consider Duplicates Even if given sample input doesnt have Duplicates and interviewer tells to proceed initially.

Round 4: Googlyness Rescheduled as Interviewer Didnt Join

Rescheduled Round 2: Interviewer is super Interactive and was told initially that question will be asked and followups based on time permits
Question is Long story short Will be Given a Logs messages Each Message is like String + timestamp
Intial Question: Print only those messages if the same message is not present in last 10 seconds.(Used Simple map <string,int> and if a new message comes we see if message is present in map and if present see its previous timestamp if current is more than previous then only print again else dont )
Asked to code the approach and he made me modify structure of code according to his thoughts and expectation.

Follow up 1: In the previous approach What is the bottle neck in realtime?
Answered Memory may go outofbounds If all are unique messages so was asked to solve that then thought for a while and discussed cleanup and he agreed the solution and so i wrote a cleanup using queue and map and he seemed satisfied.
Was a bit over enthusiast here as i was confident that i was able to figure out this followup1 and written very fast so left with 5.5 minutes more in 40minutes time so he told lets go for another followup.

Followup2: A Log message must be printed only if it is not occured in previous 10 seconds and next 10 seconds
Ex:
Leetcode 6
Leetcode 15
Java 1
Java 12
Java 23

Output:
Java 12 as Java is not present in [2,22]
Java 23 Same for Java 23

I thought for a while but couldnt able to figureout the approach in 5mns time, Interviewer gave hint too, to use the previous cleanup funciton but my stupid brain didnt listen and focus on his hint
Was able to figure out Solution Just After Exiting the Interview using the existing cleanup.

📌 Lesson learnt: Always focus on Interviewers hints what they are trying to give and try thinking in that direction.

Rescheduled Googlyness 2: Some Russian Joined and he thought it was a DSA round So because of mismatch round got cancelled and Rescheduled again

Rescheduled Googlyness 3: Just after joining the call recruiter emailed that interviewer was busy because of some last minute emergency and it got rescheduled again.

Rescheduled Googlyness 4:
Interviewer was of Warsaw and she is super cool and and is of L3
Famous Googlyness Questions from Google experience
As Googlyness postponed 4 times i mastered all questions and was ready with 4 stories covering all answers in STAR Pattern she was very impressed with my answers and a definet Strong Hire in this .

🧾 Lessons Learnt:
-> Always ask for a mock interview with recruiter when onsite rounds are scheduled with recruiter as u can feel the heat before itself as time is very tight in google interviews( 2-3 mins Intro 37minutes Interview Last 5 minutes for Questions)
-> For L4 grading criteria is super tight so expectation is production ready code with handling every corner case.
-> Always Walkthrough the code post writing code even if interviewer doesnt ask for code walkthrough.

Final Verdict: ❌ Rejection
No Feedback is provided.
CoolDown is of 12 months now sadly so will definetly try again after 12 months as recruiter told she will reachout post cooldown again.