Hi everyone,

I recently did a Google onsite that was in-person with whiteboard (first time doing a real onsite after a long time of virtual interviews). Just sharing my experince with it since it's quite different. I was honestly nervous walking in, but the day ended up feeling surprisingly smooth and nice.

The onsite day itself felt pretty well organized. The coordinator will give you clear schedule, travel/commute details, and no confusion on where to be next. I felt like the interviewer was being really collaborative, and you don't have to run any tests or write bug-free code like many virtual ones required.

Round 1 — DSA (Coding): Permutation Sequence

Problem set:
I was asked a problem similiar to this permutation sequence problem: https://leetcode.com/problems/permutation-sequence/description/

It's not the exact same but if you know how to solve this one, you can solve the one I got asked during the onsite too.

What we discussed
For this round, I feel like my interviewer was really focused on communication and explaining the solution and walk through examples before writing anything on the white board. I didn't fully finish writing everything, but interviewer said it's okay and it feel like the feedback would be positive.

Round 2 — DSA String processing problem

Problem
String processing problem on sorted strings.
Given a sorted string, find characters that appear more than twice and return their first and last positions.

What we discussed

• discussed a follow-up where you are not only given the sorted strings but also a Dictionary, see if you can remove some repeated characters so the string could match a dictionary word

This one is similiar to the Dictionary of sorted letters I practiced from this list: https://offerretriever.com/companies/85cd771e-d78d-434d-b2b1-53af58aada31

Takeaways

Overall, the problems were not extremely difficult, I honestly prepared many questions and even practiced DP a lot. I mostly did my interview prepping with leetcode + offerretriever + hellointerview (system design).

The white board experience feels more collabortive, but honestly my hand-writing is super horrible. If you also haven't written anything for a while like me lol, I'd recommend some small amount of practice writing so your hand-writing won't be a problem during interview.

Going back to whiteboard interviews actually felt refreshing. Does anyone know if more companies are going back to real-person onsite? I'd actually love this trend.