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Google Interview Experience

decayedgraycells.blogspot.com

34 pointsslevin06314 comments

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.

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.

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

Hmm, can you expound on this?

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.

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.

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!

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!

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?

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).

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

Thank for the feedback, at some point though is that looked down upon if the candidate isn't also equally fluent in at least Java and C++?

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 :)

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.

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