I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Mar 2016
Interview
The interview process is pretty straightforward. There were two back-to-back interviews. I was a bit surprised by the first one's fast pace and mess it up. The second one was much better but it didn't help. I was rejected by call and email.
The first one is mostly some small questions like the derived classes, binary search and dfs. The second one is much more complicated. Obviously I could finish it in 45 min, so the interviewer directly ask me to write only key functions. At last we were still in short of time, so the pseudo code was also allowed. I'm pretty sure I did well in the second part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
questions about derived classes, binary search
application using tree traversal. It takes a bit time to write the whole code. So the interviewer allows me to write key functions instead.
The interview was way more challenging than I anticipated, especially the technical rounds. I was thrown off by the depth of the DSA questions. One standout was a coding question about finding the median of two sorted arrays, which I recognized instantly — it was the same problem I had worked through on PracHub. The behavioral questions felt less intense, but the overall vibe was stressful. Ultimately, I didn’t receive an offer. It was a tough experience, but I'm grateful for what I learned along the way.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given two sorted arrays of size m and n, find the median of the combined sorted array in O(log(min(m,n))) time.
The interviewer was very nice, one interviewer didn't show up so I rescheduled it. When I didn't come up with the best solution, the interveiwer was very patient and give me hint as many as possible
1 screening round + 3 onsite round
All rounds were focused on DSA that included topics like strings, linked list, heap and dynamic programming. Screening round had 2 questions on qualifying which I was eligible for onsite and Googliness rounds. The whole process took nearlying 2.5 months