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JoinGoogle is a multinational technology company specializing in internet-related services and products, including its dominant search engine, online advertising, cloud computing, and the Android operating system. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and is widely known for products like Search, Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, and Google Maps.
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Interviewed at Google for a software engineer role. Behavioral went well apparently, but the coding round is what got me. They passed, and I'm looking at a 6-month wait before I can try again.
“Nailed this part.”
Had a Google SWE round where the interviewer skipped a written problem statement entirely and just showed me an image, expecting me to figure out what the problem even was before solving it. Managed to identify it as a graph problem about finding max node values, but ran out of time before I could work through the adjacency list construction properly. Came out of it pretty unsure whether any of that was enough.
“This format genuinely threw me.”
Four rounds for a Google SWE position. Three went well enough that I felt decent walking out, but the last onsite left me sweating. Needed a hint on the base problem, made a few dumb coding mistakes in the follow-up, and now I'm just waiting and hoping the earlier rounds carry enough weight.
“Got through both parts cleanly.”
Two coding rounds for a Google SWE campus role, both went well technically, still got rejected. The second interviewer was difficult to work with and the question was barely coherent for the first 20 minutes, but I cracked it anyway. Didn't matter.
“Nailed the BFS part first pass, no issues.”
Went through the full loop for a Research Engineer role at Google, technical and behavioral rounds all went well, but the coding interview tanked the whole thing. No offer, but the recruiter suggested trying again in a year, which may or may not mean anything.
“This is where I completely fell apart.”
Cleared two technical rounds at Google for a Software Engineer role after cramming DSA patterns in a week, and now heading into a 45-minute behavioral round focused on leadership and cultural fit. The technical questions were a mix of hard greedy/string problems and medium-level sliding window and binary search problems.
“This was the hard one and it showed.”
System design round at Google for a senior engineering role. One question, big scope: design a web crawler at Google scale. The kind of problem where you can talk for an hour and still feel like you barely scratched the surface.
“I started with the URL frontier and felt okay about that part.”
Prepping for a Google onsite for a software engineering role and trying to figure out what the actual coding environment looks like on the day. Mainly wanted to know if it's a real IDE with autocomplete or the same barebones Google Docs-style editor from the earlier rounds, and whether they ask you to run code against test cases.
“This was my main anxiety going in.”
Google SWE coding round, one problem the whole time. Tree validation, which sounds straightforward until you're actually in the room trying to remember every edge case you've ever seen.
“I jumped straight to cycle detection and forgot to check for multiple roots first.”
Google SWE interview with a string manipulation problem that looks deceptively simple but has a bunch of subtle invariants you need to nail down. The focus was heavily on proving correctness and complexity rather than just getting a working solution.
“I spent way too long trying to think of something clever before realizing the key insight is pretty mechanical once you see it: strip out the dots and the relative order of L/R/X tokens must match exactly between start and target, and walls must be in identical positions.”