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      Senior Software Development Engineer Interview

      4 Dec 2016
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Nov 2016

      Interview

      Total process took almost 2 months. One telephonic, followed by the onsite (5 interviews). During this process 5 times recruiters changed. Each time they told me different thing about the reference. Last one said no reference was needed till I'm getting an offer. I took preparation for 1+ month (maths, algorithm, data structures, solving problems from leetcode, glassdoor, reading papers on GFS,map reduce and many more). Interview questions were difficult (as expected from Google) but I solved all of them reasonably fast (from my perspective). 10 days after the interview recruiter told me my data structure/algorithm went well but there were some problem in the coding part of the interview, due to that I was rejected by hiring committee and asked me to reapply in 12 months. This feedback is mostly useless as I code every day at work which are reviewed by peers and I practiced a lot for this interview as well. So I don't know what went wrong in coding part. I don't know if this much time investment worth it or not. I'll probably not reapply in Google.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Signed NDA, but they were on Graph/DP/String manipulation/Bit manipulation/Encoding-decoding and some design problems.
      Answer question

      Other Senior Software Development Engineer interview reviews for Google

      Senior Software Development Engineer Interview

      6 Mar 2013
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Palo Alto, CA
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Palo Alto, CA) in Jan 2013

      Interview

      I submitted resume through a former co-worker who now works in Google. Within a week I was contacted by recruiters. Since I was available locally (Palo Alto, CA) and had a strong internal reference they found it possible to skip phone screening and schedule onsite interview right away. I had technical interviews with 5 people plus lunch. The questions were mostly open-end designs plus occasional coding of parts of my designs. The interviewers were professional, supportive and friendly. I felt confident about answers most of the time. But with design questions it is difficult to say how well I did. It is always possible to miss an area that was considered important by the interviewer. Waiting for results took a long time. It was about one month with occasional phone call exchanges with the recruiter. Google contacted all the people I listed as references. Once I had a phone conversation with a potential manager. I expected either additional screening or persuading to join the team but somehow the conversation did not feel like any of those. After a month when my expectations on getting an offer were considerably high I got a voice message from the recruiter saying that I was rejected by the executive committee. Summary: the technical part was good, the subsequent result processing was annoying and somewhat misleading, so it is "neutral" overall.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Design distributed backend side for query auto-completion feature
      Answer question
      2