My 230 Days Interview Journey with Google

Yes it was a very long journey and 230 days by any standards is very long and tough.

Getting an interview call from Google is still a dream for most of the software engineers and so was mine. I was neither from a renowned college nor I was working in a fancy startup or big MNC. Yes, I was a software engineer with almost four years of experience and never thought of applying since Google receives millions of applications from all over the globe and I thought I won’t make the cut because I had not done anything extraordinary until that point in time.

But all the stars aligned and I got a mail from a Google recruiter asking if I would be interested in exploring the job opportunities at Google, that was and still a mystery to me and I still keep wondering how they contacted me. I will discuss my assumption at the end.

First contact with the recruiter

The recruiter who contacted me was from Singapore and I assumed that we will just discuss my current role and the opportunities that they have at Google and some other stuff related to my job profile since I had an experience of four years already. But as with Google, it doesn’t leave any chance to surprise us and it was the same case here. The discussion was totally different than I expected.

The first recruiter asked me some normal stuff and then bombarded me with rapid-fire questions e.g. which is better Dijkstra or Bellman-Ford algorithm? what is complexity for insert in min-heap, and a lot of others like these. I was very shocked and surprised because first I was not expecting these kinds of questions at the recruiter level and second that I had been a little out of touch with these topics since I graduated four years back and these things I didn’t use in my day to day job.

Obviously, I was not able to answer all of these correctly and the recruiter felt that I was not prepared for interviews right now and I needed some preparation before onsite interviews. So the recruiter asked me that since you don’t seem to be prepared would you like to take some time and brush up on these topics. Initially, I thought that since I have not answered all of those rapid-fire questions correctly so recruiter might move on from my profile and I won’t get a chance so hearing this brought back the delight in me. I asked her how much time I can take, to which she said that you can take one month also so I took one month’s time and she said that after one month book your slot in my calendar and we will meet again after 1 month.

Starting of preparation

Since I got one month's time to prepare and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to get interviewed with Google so I created some strategies to cover all data structure and algorithm topics and get hands-on practice on them.

First I brushed all the data structures and learned all those data structures that I missed learning during my college days. I will share my preparation strategy in some other posts.

After brushing up on DS I started practicing on Leetcode with 4–5 questions per day since I was also fulfilling my office duties and I had to take out around 3–4 hours for DS practice and with time I got a good grip on all major DS. Still algorithm part was missing so I started solving some previous year questions asked in Google, Amazon, and other top companies and initially it was very tough but with time this also got easy.

Second interaction with the recruiter

So after one month was finished I set up a calendar invite on the recruiter’s calendar and she canceled immediately, I was worried suspecting that if they are not hiring anymore or they are not interested in me, but fortunately that was not the case, I mailed her asking for the same and I got to know that she is not hiring for that role currently, she changed team and was working on something else, and then she referred me to some other recruiter who was now handling these stuff.

I contacted the other recruiter and set up a call and in that call also the same thing happened with some quick rapid-fire questions and since I was prepared this time so I got most of them correct and she also sensed that I am prepared and then she asked me to set up telephone screening round before the onsite interviews. The screening round was supposed to be a real interview with two Leetcode medium-level questions within 45 minutes, so she prepped me for this round by providing me with all the necessary study materials and some online platform links where I can practice mock interviews and do coding practice. This time also I took one month time before the interview and she was OK with that.

That’s where I realized that Google recruiting process is pretty sorted and they are not in a hurry to hire and they want to give us ample time to come up with the best version of ourselves in interviews.

Telephone Screening Round

After another one month’s preparation, I was pretty confident that at least I can clear this screening round since it was screening round and won’t be of the level of the real onsite rounds but as always I was wrong, this round had the same standard as the actual onsite round and 2 questions were asked and first one I came up with the solution quickly and implemented it but for the second one I took a long time to come up with the approach and had to take a hint from interviewer to get to the final solution but I implemented the solution very well by covering all the edge cases.

After the interview recruiter contacted me asking how was the interview and some other stuff and then later she provided me the interview feedback. I was very nervous and scared because after my performance in the screening round the opportunity with Google was slightly slipping out of my hands. While giving the feedback she told that you still need to work on your problem-solving skills but your coding skills are very good and that saved me somehow but not fully because I will have to give another screening to be sure that I can do better than this and for this also I took one more month for preparation.

Second Telephone Screening Round

After one month of pure dedication, I was ready for this round and as expected I aced this round with flying colors and got very good feedback from the interviewer, and got a green signal from the recruiter that I was good to go for onsite interviews and from here my onsite interviews started.

There were planning to take 4 round of onsite (even though they were virtual) interviews, 3 were coding round and 1 was googliness or cultural fit round. For these also recruiter prepped me very well and making me familiar with the whole process.

Onsite Interviews

All the onsite interviews went fine, I was not very confident about what will be the feedback for these interviews because according to me I kept missing one thing or other even though these were very minor such as some syntax mistake in some built-in function call or naming variables very long which were not appropriate as per interview settings because we were not coding on an IDE so there was no autosuggestion and I had to type these manually or do copy-paste every time. So because of these things I was a little nervous about the result and before the hiring committee feedback I had to go through another round of discussion to see which team I will fit in.

Team Matching Discussion

Usually, in team matching discussion we have a chat with many managers from different teams and we discuss our interests and the tell us about the kind of work and projects their team is working on and if both show the same interest then the talk settles there only or else we keep talking to other managers.

Fortunately for me my first meeting with one manager was enough within minutes our rhythms started to come in sync and there was no need to discuss with some other manager and that’s how my team matching discussion round finished

I started in March 2021 and team matching finished in July 2021 and that my profile and feedback went to the hiring committee in the form of a hiring packet and after this, all I had do to was to wait, and the wait was very long for some or other reason and finally in September 2021 I got the hire decision and in October 2021 I will be joining Google as a software engineer. And all the efforts I put, all the time I invested finally came to a fruitful end and I was delighted because what started as a dream was turning into a reality soon.

My Assumption On Why I Got contacted By Google

My initial suspicion is towards the Google’s Foo Bar challenge I gave, this challenge is for google hiring only and it provides a set of problems and after three stages it asks if we want to share our profile with Google recruiting team. But this challenge I took was in December 2020, and it was a long time and then I got contacted by Google so still not sure if that was the source because of which they contacted me.

I will share the detailed interview preparation in a separate post.

Thanks for reading

Be Curious and Be Happy