My Interview Experience At Google

I have had my interview at Google recently, comprising of one phone interview, three onsite virtual coding rounds and the googleyness round.

It was a 4 month long journey and this is how the whole process looked like.

Step-I. Resume Sharing & Interview Scheduling

• I updated my resume and applied for 2 roles at Google through LinkedIn. Google allows you to apply for at most 3 roles of your interest within a time span of 1 month. Surprisingly, I got a mail from the recruiter the very next day.
• Me and my recruiter had a chat where we discussed the role I was applying for, my work experience, the level for which I will be interviewed at Google, how much preparation time do I need, and many such things.
• The recruiter confirmed the interview dates with me and provided me with the resources for the interview preparation. I had asked for ~1.5 months for the preparation.

Step-II. Online Phone Interview

Phone interview was at evening, and it was of about 45 mins. Interviewer was pretty much interested in the projects, I had mentioned in my resume and the discussion went on for about 20 mins. Then, we moved on to the coding question and it was based on String manipulations. The question was on a bit easier side, but then it becomes important to come up with various possible approaches and discuss their trade-offs. While coding, the interviewer pointed out that one of my assumptions were not true, I quickly changed the data structure to cover the usecase. I was able to complete the code within given time frame, covering all the edge cases.

I can not stress enough on how important it is, to be vocal about your thought process and to be attentive toward each single word of the interviwer.

Recruiter contacted me after 7 days, he said I have cleared the phone interview with green tick in all the check boxes.

One important advice he gave me, was that I should not take too long to get my onsite interview scheduled as I was already in practice. When the process is longer, we generally tend to lose focus.

Step-III. Virtual Onsite Coding Round I

A day time 45 mins interview, interviewer was from Google Cloud India team. The question was based on Graph cycles, we discussed the approaches based on Union-Find and DFS. I did miss some points on the Graph structure, I could only improve it after interviewers hint. I was able to complete the code without any bugs.

Recruiter contacted me the very next day and gave me feedbacks. I was required to work more on design, to be more attentive towards the hints provided by the interviewer, etc.

One thing I realised from the feedback is that we should be not be vocal of the half-baken ideas, interviewers do count rectifying it as a hint. The only way to improve it is practising, mock interviews are very helpful in it.

Step-IV. Virtual Onsite Coding Round II

45 mins interview at the night time, interviewer was not of Indian origin. It took me some time to get his accent. The question was related to ranking based on overlaping/non-overlapping intervals and was a bit trickier to understand in first place. Since, I was not very clear with the accent, we tried communicating as much as possible through writings, diagrams and good amount of test cases.

I was able to solve the problem without any bugs, covering all the edge cases. I did use sorting with the intention to optimize, but while writing the code I missed using it for early terminations.

In Google, they have this policy of having interviewers from different locations which can land you in a hard situation sometime. Communicating as much as possible, is the key.

Step-V. Virtual Onsite Coding Round III

Well, it was the hardest one. 45 mins interview during the day. The question was based on graph traversal, connectivity and dynamic programming. We started with the backtrack based approach, but interviewer asked me come up with more optimized one. Then we settled down on dynamic programming with traversal in the specific pattern. I took around 20–25 mins for coding, really too slow, that too with many bugs. Interviewer asked me to have a dryrun of my code, I did fix but I missed a major one, which I realised after the interview was over. I had not handled the boundary conditions well. By the end, I just wanted the interview to be over.

Step-VI. GoogleyNess Round

It was on the same day as my last virtual coding interview. It was a behavioural round and lots of discussion went on. Overall, it went well.

The very next day, my recruiter contacted me and said that the feedback was not on positive side this time. She would scan my profile again after one year. And I got rejected. Never the less, it was a good experience and I was back in the game after 3 and a half long years.

Bdw, I was in the pulmonary phase on covid infection during my last 2 interviews. I should have rather asked for the reschedule, Google recruiters are amazingly supportive. Well, I do not claim that the result would have been different.

Some of the resources which I used for my interview preparations :-

• LeetCode Premium
• GeekForGeeks
• Interview Experinces
• Pramp for mock Interviews

Practice is the Key, paired up with Mock Interviews.