Google India Interview Experience

This post is a continuation to the Interview Preparation post I’ve written.
It is focused on various rounds and the process at Google. The entire process took around 5 months.
Note: I wouldn’t be able to disclose exact questions because of NDA.

I had applied for a SWE backend role in Bangalore, through a referral in October 2020. Within 2 days of applying, a recruiter reached out to me. She asked me briefly about work with my current employer, and what kind of work I was looking for. Then she briefed me about the various rounds and that first would be a phone screen. She wanted to know how prepared I was in terms of DSA (I had completed ~100 problems in Leetcode by then) and told my prep was enough to start. Since I wasn’t confident, I asked to schedule the interview after 2 weeks.

Phone Screen

2 easy LeetCode based questions. Out of these, one was on Binary Trees(not BST) and other on Array (related to mountain arrays).
I came up with the most optimized solution, and after discussing it, had to write error free code in 45 mins for both of them. Before jumping to coding, he asked me to come up with edge cases for both. I had missed handling it in one of them so corrected it. The interviewer was friendly.

Since this was my first round, I was quite nervous and worried about the time. Around a week and a half later, recruiter informed me that I had cleared phone screening. She also gave a detailed feedback about each aspect. The main points were — not covering edge cases, writing code in hurry and very silent while coding. I decided to work on all of these and let the fear go (mentioned in the Prep post).

Recruiter mentioned I’d have 4 onsite coding rounds + 1 behavioral. And she would schedule them as 3+2 (basically if the first 3 are cleared, then I’ll move further). Because of corona, all rounds were hosted virtually on Meet.
My recruiter made sure I was confident by boosting my morale, and being flexible with interview scheduling.

Around this time a lot of employees were going to be on year-end holidays so there were some delays (since I’d asked for a month’s prep time). Eventually my 5 rounds happened as 2+3 and I was given a month gap between them.

Round 1

1 Hard question. I couldn’t find the question on Leetcode anywhere.

It was on Graphs, the problem was complex so I took 20 mins to understand and come up with the most optimized solution (DFS based). Entire interview passed in this question itself.
Later, I got to know that interviewer wanted to ask a follow-up too. So he pointed out speed as an issue, rest all was rated positive.

Round 2

1 Hard question. The interviewer was a Red coder on Codeforces and asked a super interesting yet hard question. He made it clear that he’s going to ask just 1 question.

The question was an open ended one and used a variety of concepts like matrix, DP, Math.

I had fun discussing the problem with the interviewer because I learnt a lot, but this round didn’t go well.

Round 3

1 medium and follow-up on the same question. The question was related to ranking and the solution expected was BST related.
I gave him multiple solutions, discussed the trade-offs, was able to solve the problem in an optimized way and coded the follow-up part too. The interviewer seemed impressed with the solutions. This round went very well.

Round 4

1 medium (Graph, Tree) and its follow-up question.

I discussed several solutions, and finally coded one of them based on time complexity. I was asked possible edge cases, and had to actually walk through the code to verify all of them are covered. The follow-up was easy too. This round went great.

Round 5 (Googleyness Round)

This interview was a lot of fun because the interviewer asked really interesting questions and not the standard ones like describe an instance of your leadership, etc. Basically situations were given and how did/would I handle them.
In 40 mins, he asked a lot of questions and heard each one of them with interest!

After 2 weeks in March, my recruiter called to give me the good news that I was selected! There were some ups and downs in the process, and we were very happy that I made it. Since I was in a hurry because of other offers, after some negotiation we closed the offer on same day.

It was a great experience interviewing with Google because — all the interviewers were very friendly and it seemed like a conversation and not a test. The experience was very different from others. Even the recruiter was so warm and friendly that after few conversations, she didn’t feel like an HR anymore. There were regular calls between us and all the communication happened on calls, never on mails. Also, the entire scheduling was handled by a different team and was super flexible and smooth.

Few important points

• Each interview has a specific format — first 5 mins for introduction and last 5 mins for questions. Rest 35 mins are for the core coding questions.
  The interviewer explains the problem, then you have to discuss various solutions and describe trade-offs. Ask clarifying questions regarding data types, sorted/unsorted data, etc. After interviewer has agreed with the solution, start coding. Explain what you’re writing while coding. After you’re done, they’ll point out at mistakes/pose questions in the code. You have to walk through the code with some edge cases and verify that the code covers all of them. This is very important.
  Then talk about the time and space complexity.
• It is very important to write fully functional, error-free code. They actually expect the code to compile correctly. Practice on notepad/Google doc, etc.
• Behavioral round is very important. Normally, the recruiter explains the expectations of this round very clearly by giving a lot of examples. You can read about the STAR(Situation, Task, Action and Result) method and various other resources online. Spend sometime and organize your experiences into STAR format.
• The interviewers are really friendly so keep calm.
• Your recruiter is your friend here. After my second round went bad, my recruiter took the call and cancelled the 3rd one, gave me sometime to prepare Hard questions for further rounds and then moved ahead.

Best of luck, and happy to help if you’ve any questions!