Google·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Google SWE coding round with a string problem that looks deceptively simple until you start thinking about how many substrings you actually have to check. The core challenge is anagram validation across all contiguous substrings of length 3 or more, and the dictionary lookup angle makes it more interesting than a typical sliding window question.
- Given a string of letters and access to an English dictionary (as a set), return true if every contiguous substring of length 3 or more can be rearranged into a valid dictionary word. In other words, for every such substring, there must exist some word in the dictionary that is an anagram of it.
“The anagram-check part is fine, sort the characters or use a frequency map, compare against dictionary entries.”