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      Software Engineer Interview

      10 Feb 2010
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Dec 2009

      Interview

      The process began when I responded to an unsolicited contact from a Google recruiter. We scheduled a phone screen interview. During the phone screen, I was asked a number of questions that essentially verified that my skills and experience listed on my resume were correct, and then we did a few basic design and coding questions. A day or two later, I was notified that Google wanted to bring me in for an onsite interview. The onsite interview was scheduled for about three weeks later. Google advised me to study up on algorithms and data structures, big-O analysis, and so on, which I did. At the onsite interview, I was interviewed by five different software engineers, each interview lasting approximately one hour. Each interview consisted of one or more challenging software design or coding problems. In all cases, I was asked to do big-O analysis on the run time and/or memory requirements of my solution. I got performance anxiety towards the end of the day, and performed poorly on two of the interviews, in which I froze up on questions I should have been able to answer. A few days later, after the hiring committee considered my application and interview results, I got a call back from the recruiter who notified me that Google was declining to give me an offer, but because I had excellent personal recommendations and very good feedback from most of my interviewers, that I should re-apply in 12 to 18 months.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Design a system to find all Googlewhacks and analyze its efficiency in terms of memory, storage, and run time, and its scalability characteristics.
      Answer question
      1

      Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Google

      Software Engineer Interview

      4 May 2014
      Anonymous employee
      Auburndale, FL
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google (Auburndale, FL) in Apr 2014

      Interview

      Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."
      2501

      Software Engineer Interview

      3 Jun 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Google

      Interview

      Etapa de RH para filtragem de curriculo e fit inicial, e Screening Técnico com código em leetcode focado em algoritmos, onde o código era feito em um bloco de notas, sem uso de IDEs.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Você conhece sobre Big O notation?
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      2 Jun 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA)

      Interview

      I was a bit nervous since it was my first big interview with a company like this. Wish I could of done better, but thats all learning experience for next time.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      "Design and implement an LRU cache supporting get and put in O(1) average time".
      Answer question

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