My Google Interview Experience [Selected]
Hey Everyone, this is something which has been due for a very long time: sharing my interview experience at Google.
I am Ananya Chopra, a fourth-year undergraduate student at Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida , currently a winter intern at Cisco . I was a Google Intern in Summer ’23 at their Hyderabad Campus under GCP.
Resume Shortlisting and Interview Call
In my third year of college, I got the opportunity to interview at Google when one of the recruiters contacted me through email and asked me to fill in some basic details, like my latest resume and availability dates for the interview. I quickly replied yes and shared my latest resume with her.
After almost a week, I got a reply back from the recruiter that I would have two rounds of interviews in about two weeks. In those two weeks, the topics I mostly focused on were:
- Stacks
- Queues
- Priority Queues
- Graphs
- Trees
- Binary Search
It is also important to go through previous interview experiences of other people, as it helps you get an idea about what all can be asked by the interviewer. Since I had previously given interviews with some other companies, I had some experience with interviews. For first-timers, make sure to give at least two mock interviews before you sit for the interview.
It is important to practice writing clean code on Google Docs, as a similar IDE is provided during the interview.
Also in those preparatory weeks, there was a session conducted by Google to give all the students who were giving interviews in the upcoming weeks an idea about the interview process.
Interview Experience
I had two interviews scheduled on consecutive days, and you had to appear for both interviews. The cumulative response of both the interviewers would decide whether you’d get the offer or not.
I had my first interview around 21st August 2022. It was a 45-minute interview, and the interviewer was very communicative during the whole interview. I was asked two DSA questions based on trees. Both the questions were similar in nature, the latter being the hard version of the first one.
From my personal experience, I think it is important that you code up both the questions within the time span of 45 minutes in order to increase your chances of selection.
The next day, I had my second interview scheduled, which was also 45 minutes. In this round, I was also asked two DSA questions based on graph algorithms and priority queues. Since I had coded two questions within 35 minutes, the interviewer ended up asking a hard version of the second question but only wanted me to explain my approach by writing its pseudocode. After the DSA questions, the interviewer also gave me a chance to ask any questions I had. Make sure you prepare for the same.
Results and Offer Extension
After my interview, there was a hiring freeze announced at Google, so I had very little hope that I would actually get an offer. But after waiting for a week, I got an email from my recruiter that they were extending me an offer to join Google as a summer intern the following summer 😊.
Here are some of the resources that I had used to prepare for my interview
- Graph Algorithms Problems to Practice
- LeetCode Discuss Lists and My Lists So Far (Topic-wise/Difficulty-wise)
- DSA Sheet by Love Babbar (I made an Excel sheet of my own for this and used to mark important questions with different colors in order to go back and revise them)
- Sliding Window Technique and Question Bank
Also, make sure to participate in LeetCode weekly and biweekly contests, as I have always found them very useful.