I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google in Jan 2012
Interview
I earned my phone interview one week after I posted my resume for a particular job in youtube. First I received a 5-7 minutes phone call from HR, it was just about usual stuff, what I am doing currently and what I have done in the past. Then I scheduled with their HR person a 45 minute technical interview. The interviewer told me he is working in youtube. After 5 minutes of intro stuff about my previous work, he asked me to start writing on the shared doc. The problem he posed to me was not usual algorithm and data structure stuff. I found it really very hard, first to understand and then after few more minutes of his explanation, I still had little clue. I don't know if he was unable to make me understand or my brain was just blocked.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We have a schedular. Timer is available to the schedular. The clients of this schedular want to call this schedular with 2 parameters, 1) time interval in ms 2) callback function. The schedular will invoke specified callback function after specified time intevals. Design data structure and implement it.
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