Google Interview Experience

Google Interview Experience(decayedgraycells.blogspot.com)

34 points by slevin063 9 years ago | 14 comments

gaius 9 years ago |

just like most engineers I applied to Google multiple times

Is this really like "most" engineers? My own experience is the opposite, I have been contacted multiple times by Google recruiters trawling LinkedIn or whatever, none of whom were aware of any of the others. I know a few Googlers and as far as I am aware none of them "applied", they were all contacted.

akhilcacharya 9 years ago | |

Personally, I'm more surprised it takes most people multiple times and months of prep when you hear is Stanford freshmen getting internships with no additional effort save for reading CTCI.

gaius 9 years ago | | |

Well the tests are all optimized to filter for early 20s from a handful of CS programmes.

slevin063 9 years ago | |

My mistake. It should be "just like most engineers I know at Google, I ...", which includes my friends, interviewers and people in Google interview process videos.

kkirsche 9 years ago |

As someone who dreams of one day making it therI, this scares the crap out of me and makes me feel like everything I know and have worked for isn't possible. It's really disappointing to hear that this is the interview style as I struggle coding with people watching and judging every little thing that I do.

namelezz 9 years ago | |

Don't be discouraged by the OP's story. The OP has several years of experiences in C as a firmware developer(read his LinkedIn) so the interviewers may have high expectation in his "coding abilities". Lesson from the story: know your sh1t well. Good luck!

khedoros 9 years ago |

I had a similar experience (and result) recently, although it was my first time interviewing with Google, and I did my coding in Python. I want able to get any detail whatsoever about why I was rejected; the feedback Vijay got would have been appreciated!

bogomipz 9 years ago | |

Isn't Python a decent choice for whiteboarding algorithms style interviews? Visually Python is quite streamlined and also Python alleviates having to write a bunch of boilerplate. I'm curious why using Python would be an issue for a Google type interview?

It was my understanding that one of the reasons for these style interviews was to get away from being language specific - in other words if someone has good CS fundamentals, and could reason about different problem spaces that they could probably pick up any language. Is this no longer true?

khedoros 9 years ago | | |

Yes, I think it's decent (and that's the reason I chose it). I don't think it was an issue in my interview process; I was just trying to say that I had a similar experience to the OP, but I also wanted to mention some differences.

Google's questions tend to be about data structures and algorithms, and fairly language-agnostic (although you're expected to know the language that you choose well, and use it elegantly).

gbin 9 years ago | | |

Using Python for an interview at Giogle is absolutely not a problem. Source: I interview candidates there.

slevin063 9 years ago | | |

In my experience, they were language agnostic till it is high level. Unfortunately I use C at my work place, embedded C to be exact :)

thefastlane 9 years ago | | |

the practice (generally) at present is that you are asked to choose a specific language ahead of time from a list the recruiter offers you. python is one of them, so is C++. but many languages aren't. for example, you could not go in and do your interview with, say, OCaml or Clojure.