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Google interview notes, page 127 of 215

FAANG / Big Tech

Most of these Google write-ups come from Software Engineers (1,167), then Product Managers (686) and Data Scientists (125). The most reported rounds are the product sense round (667), the technical phone screen (660), the behavioral / leadership round (252) and the onsite coding round (214).

2146 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one question the whole time, basically a scheduling problem dressed up slightly differently than the classic version. Nothing too wild but the pressure of knowing it's Google makes your brain do funny things.
  • Given a list of meeting time intervals with start and end times, find the minimum number of conference rooms needed to schedule all meetings without conflicts.

“I knew this problem.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one graph problem the whole session. Pretty standard Dijkstra territory but the edge case around unreachable nodes is where things get interesting.
  • Given a weighted directed graph and a starting node, find the minimum time for a signal to reach every other node. Return the maximum of all shortest path times, or -1 if any node can't be reached.

“Classic Dijkstra setup.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Got a strategy question at Google for a PM role that was basically a macro economics case study. Not what I expected walking in.
  • How does the US-China trade conflict affect Apple's business?

“I fumbled the opener because I started listing tariff numbers instead of structuring the problem.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a data engineer role at Google, just one question about tooling and past projects. Short and fairly straightforward, though it opened up into a longer conversation than I expected.
  • What data tools have you worked with, and what specific projects did you use those tools for?

“Went through my usual stack but fumbled a bit trying to connect each tool to a concrete project on the spot.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jun 2026
Did two onsite rounds for a firmware engineering role at Google, got split feedback (one leaning hire, one leaning no hire), and now they want a third technical round with a staff-level engineer from one of the SSD teams. Never heard of this happening before and genuinely stressed about what's coming.
  • Firmware-specific bit manipulation problems at a hard difficulty level.

“This was the meat of both rounds.”

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Google·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a Data Scientist role. One question, but it had four parts and basically asked you to autopsy a bad call you made in excruciating detail.
  • Walk me through a high-stakes decision you made that turned out to be wrong. Cover why you made it, how your reasoning failed, how you caught and fixed the mistake, and what you'd change about your process going forward.

“This question is four questions stitched together and they absolutely expect you to hit all four parts.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round, one algorithmic problem the whole time. The problem sounded manageable until I actually had to think through the edge cases under pressure.
  • Given an integer array, determine whether removing exactly one element can leave the remaining array with at least one pivot index (an index where the sum of all elements to its left equals the sum of all elements to its right). Return true or false.

“I got the brute force out pretty quickly, O(n^2), try removing each element and recheck for a pivot.”

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Google·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Google SWE online assessment, two problems on HackerRank with a 90-minute total clock. The first problem was a pure implementation task dressed up as an anti-spam email verification system. Nothing tricky algorithmically, just a lot of spec details that could bite you if you skim the prompt.
  • Implement an email verification token generator: split an email body into fixed-size chunks, map each character to a numeric value using a predefined table, sum the values per chunk to get a checksum, then index into a verification string (with modular wrap if the checksum exceeds its length) to build the final token.

“Looks easy and it mostly is, but the modular wrap on the verification string index is the thing that trips people up.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Google PM interview with a single estimation question framed around a pretty wild scenario. Not your typical market sizing, this one required thinking through physical constraints and latency in a way I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • You're a PM for Gmail. Your team just won a contract to provide email services to a 10,000-person colony on Mars. How would you estimate the network bandwidth required?

“I went straight to the user-side numbers first, average emails per person per day, attachment sizes, that kind of thing.”

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Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Interviewed at Google for a product strategy role and got hit with a market entry question about streaming. Not a lot of context in the prompt so I had to build the whole framework from scratch on the spot.
  • How should Google enter the streaming market?

“I started by questioning whether Google should enter at all, which I think was the right move but I spent too long on that part.”

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