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    Google Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions

    Interviews at Google

    124 Interview Reviews

    Experience

    Experience
    53%
    17%
    30%

    Getting an Interview

    Getting an Interview
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    32%
    25%
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    Difficulty

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    Interviews for Top Jobs at Google

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    Senior Software Engineer Interview

    Anonymous Employee
    Accepted Offer
    Positive Experience
    Difficult Interview

    Interview

    Very smooth: Everything was well taken care of, from flight booking to local transportation. One additional hotel night was offered if you cannot return on the same day. The interview itself was typical tech company interviews. They focused mainly on your software development capability.

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    Interview Questions

    Other Interview Reviews for Google

    1. Helpful (2)  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Declined Offer
      Negative Experience
      Easy Interview

      Interview

      Simple and fast. Took about 2 weeks to complete. From first call to coding interview. Declined because of the low offer vs my previous employer. Also the location wasn't as expected.

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      Interview Questions

      • Sort an array and then reverse it.   1 Answer

    2.  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in San Jose, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (San Jose, CA (US)) in September 2020.

      Interview

      1 Phone Interview and 1 Virtual Technical Interview
      The questions were of medium difficult level involving graphs and trees. Overall the experience was very interactive and friendly. I did my best but missed by a slim margin

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      Interview Questions

      • Signed an NDA but graph related questions.   1 Answer
      3. Join the Google team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (1)  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Austin, TX (US)
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Austin, TX (US)) in August 2020.

      Interview

      It was a step by step process:
      A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. I shared my resume.
      I received an email the next day asking for my availability for an interview. I gave 5 optional dates 1 month away, but rescheduled later.
      I received another email after 3 days, confirming the date and time, along with the interview process information and preparation guidelines.
      Technical Round: There was one Engineer on the call, and the link to code pad was already shared. We connected, and the interview took off in a minute.

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      Interview Questions

      • You have some sticks with positive integer lengths. You can connect any two sticks of length x and y by paying a cost of x+y.
        You perform this action until there is one stick remaining. Return the minimum cost of connecting all the given sticks into one stick.
        Input: 5 2 8 1   2 Answers

    4. Helpful (8)  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Interview

      Had a phone screen and went straight to onsite because I had other strong offers already on the table. The onsite was 4 1-hour technical interviews. Some tested me on straight algo programming problems, others asked me more system design questions.

      Like with most other companies, all interviews are introduced as "conversations" where you work together with the interviewers towards a solution. I found this to be true for the most part besides one notable exception.

      My last interviewer for the day seemed like he was having a bad day or something. He clearly didn't want to be there, and seemed to express obvious dislike towards me. His question was: "Tell me how you would make Google Maps, and what technical decision-making you would go through?"

      That question is straightforward enough as far as system design questions go. The problem here is how that question process went. Generally in these kinds of interviews, you don't want to make assumptions, and you'll ask several clarifying questions to help tackle the problem in a focused way. The interviewer refused to answer my questions, and spent most of the interview on his phone, apparently texting. When I finished with the system design part, he asked me to "Implement part of Google Maps with actual code". I asked for clarifying questions about this part, because Google Maps is a giant undertaking, and his exact words were "I'm not here to try to help you pass this interview". Cool.

      When my recruiter got back to me, she said she had the good news that I made it to the stage of Google deciding what kind of offer they would want to get me, and that I was going to preallocated to the Daydream team, which was the team I had expressed interest in.

      A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call saying that I was actually not being given an offer. When I asked why, she said one of my interviewers came back with strong negative feedback, and made a case to the reviewing panel that I should not get hired, and that feedback overruled the otherwise glowing feedback I had from my other three interviewers. I told her about my experience with the Google Maps guy, but she said her hands were tied, and I believed her because I know large companies don't tend to give their recruiters much say in hiring decisions.

      Idk. I get it. There are going to be bad interviewers at every company, especially a corporate monolith like Google where plenty will slip through the cracks. Just unfortunate that I had to be on the receiving end of one of them, and that one bad person in the whole process can derail your potential offer.

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      Interview Questions

      • Tell me how you would make Google Maps, and what technical decision-making you would go through?   3 Answers

    5.  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google in April 2020.

      Interview

      Process was fast and the recruiter was very nice. phone screen + onsite ( system design 2 + coding + behavioral ). For system design, I would prepare more on their current product offerings or the team you have applied for.

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      Interview Questions

      • describe a time when your project lost focus.   1 Answer

    6.  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Easy Interview

      Interview

      It was very good the questions were very easy and it was a very smooth process . Very good recruiters compared to other companies. I had a great time interviewing for the google.

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      Interview Questions

    7.  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Google in February 2020.

      Interview

      I was contacted by the recruiting team. They were very helpful and detailed in the process and set up a phone interview. The interview was a typical coding round on google docs.
      The question asked however was absurd. I was given 15 mins to come up with the mathematical formula for magic squares and then implement the solution

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      Interview Questions

      • Find the formula to solve an nXn Magic Square   2 Answers

    8. Helpful (1)  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in San Jose, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (San Jose, CA (US)) in September 2019.

      Interview

      I had a phone interview with recruiter. About a week later, I had a video / coding interview with a Senior Software Engineer. He was reasonable to work with in the interview.

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      Interview Questions

      • The questions were appropriate for the job, and were totally reasonable. Unfortunately, I didn't prepare and blew the opportunity.   2 Answers

    9. Helpful (6)  

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied in-person. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Google.

      Interview

      Recruiter was very compassionate and professional through the overall process all the way until conveying that reject decision.(Got some specific feedback on nitpicked issues on mistakes made and some complements). Overall the experience feels like a big machinery(It is GOOGLE come on! ) churning through the huge number of candidates to prove themselves they believe they can hire only who are star software engineers (who can code like a machine as if coding is the singular aspect of software engineering and makes no mistakes in the first attempt). A mix of some friendly and some intimidating jerkish engineers. One interviewer used some intimidating words ('Be careful') whenever he thought there was a mistake in an interface I was asked to define, a guy who said 'we have already done this', pulled of shaking hands with me in a rude way (I accidentally had done the gesture apparently already once), couple of cases the English language of the engineers who interviewed were bad enough that I could not understand their question or not sure if they understood my analysis when he/she gave feedback. Overall, the process felt the engineers want to prove why those engineers are in Google( and why they are convinced that these interviews ) and why most others coming into interview should not be. In one case, another employee was annoyed that my interviewer was staying in the conference room too long when he was banging the door. So, when we came out of the interview the other guy started yelling that he had to wait so long and could not get into his meeting. At the end of the interview came out with the feeling this place has more baggage of bad personalities and churn of the mill imperfect humans instead of 'I want to work at the places where all modern complex distributed systems problems where solved impacting average person in the world.'

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      Interview Questions

      • Cache API design   1 Answer
      • Performance investigation to assess a timing out website   1 Answer
      • Implementing an Iterator(next, hasnext) interface for a stream to news topics,   1 Answer
      • Search a max value in an unsorted array. (Very abstract question) in better than O(n).   5 Answers
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