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      Software Engineer Interview

      11 Oct 2024
      Anonymous interview candidate
      San Francisco, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2024

      Interview

      Hello all, I have completed my google interview(onsites) and just recieved a reject. I am summarizing my complete interview experience over here. I applied in early may and the recruiter first reached out to me in late June to set up my phone screen. Phone Screen: The interviewer was from the google maps team. I was asked a LC medium level question which involved dp and math related to prime numbers. The initial question was quite easy and i discussed my approach and wrote the code within 20 minutes, the follow up built on the previous question and need to cache previous results. I explained to solution and wrote down the code in the remaining time. The interviews asked me abouth the time complexties and if there were any optimizations that i could think off. I recieved an email that i have cleared the phone screen the next morning and i had a call with the recruiter the following day to set up my on-site interviews. I asked for 3 weeks to prepare for my onsites and had in scheduled in mid August. OnSite 1: This was a googleyness round. I had a wonderful interviewer that really helped calm my nerves for the stressful day ahead. The questions were basically situation based/hypothetical questions that revolved around team work, conflicts and time management. I had a very engaging conversation with the interviewer, felt more like a chat with a co-worker than a interview. OnSite 2: This was my first coding round. The initial question was a simple array / 2 pointer queastion, but he had 4 followups in the span of 45 minutes. Each follow up was harder than the previous question and needed the use of sliding windows and 2 pointers and DP. I managed to get the optimized solution and time complexity for 4 of the questions, but the interviewer posted the last question with 3 minutes left i couldnt come up with the approach in the remaining time. In the end he explained how to solve the question which involved using the solutions of 3 of the previous questions. Apart from the last question i think i had the optimized solution and a good code for all the questions i was asked. OnSite 3: This was my most challenging interview. I had an interviewer who had a poker face through out the interview. No expressions or hints whatsoever. He just told me his name asked for my name and posted the question right away. The question was quite challanging involved points on a 2 dimensional plane(graph), BFS, topological sort and a bit of computation and a follow up which used DP. I managed to explain the optimized solution for the initial question discussed the time complexity and wrote the code (which was really big and took a lot of time), then i was asked the follow up i gave the interviewer 2 different approaches which came to my head to which i only got nods from him, i ended up selecting one and explained the time complexity, why it would be better than the other and started writing the code. Halfway through the code with 5 minutes left the interviewer stopped and said he always left the last 5 minutes for question from the candidates. I asked him a few questions about his journey to google and the team he was working in to which i got short, generic answers and he ended the meeting with 3 minutes left of the 45 minutes. OnSite 4: This was my best round. I had a great interview who introduced himself asked me about how my previous interviews went and the posted the question. The question was not a typical LC problem. It was more of a Data Structure design for a specific case. I explained the working and i would use linked lists. he asked me about the time complexity and asked me write the code. Then he modified the question a bit. I was going down a different approach and gave me a couple of hints and i was able to come up with the expected solution quickly and wrote down the code within a few minutes and completed the questions with 10 minutes left. Then we had good converstion about google, how a day as a SWE would look like. I felt the interviewer was really satisfied with how i performed i felt really good about this Interview. After my onsites there was a long wait of 3 weeks before the recruiter reached out to me only to say "NO". I felt that I had performed quite good apart from a couple of hiccups, but quite good is not good enough for google apparantly. I was not given any feedback on the how any of the interview went. The recruiter emailed me in the last hour of the previous day saying the she had the results of my interview and wanted to schedule a call for the first hour of the next day. It was just a 3 minute call, we exchanged pleasantries and she said that It was a close call but Unfortunately the team decided not to move forward with my application at this time and that she cannot share any feedback whatsoever. I hope this helps anyone who is interviewing at google. The questions were not really that complicated its just that they are left open ended and they expect you to ask a lot of clarifying

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Array, dp, Data Structure design, grapghs.
      Answer question
      3

      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

      30 Jun 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google

      Interview

      OA - Round1 (1 tech + 1 bh) - Round2 two tech interview OA 1 Leetcode easy + 1 lc medium R1 tech 1 lc medium ask what is Fibonacci function R2 hard + medium greedy + game design

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      - why google - pround proj - time mgmt issue - ask about the resume proj - ask about your comments to previous manager
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      29 Jun 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      New York, NY
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Google (New York, NY)

      Interview

      Interview process consists of 2 rounds: 1st screening round (1 technical, 1 behavioral interview) 2nd onsite round (2 technical interviews) All technical interviews are still typical leetcode style DSA interviews, not the new AI based ones.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      They asked typical behavioral and technical interviews.
      Answer question