Google·Data Analyst·Technical Phone Screen
- How many planes are currently flying over the US at any given moment?
“I started by thinking about daily flights and tried to work backward from there.”
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
“I started by thinking about daily flights and tried to work backward from there.”
“The backtracking part clicked for me pretty quickly but the lexicographic ordering tripped me up for a bit.”
“My first instinct was BFS and that part was fine.”
“I knew LC 1032 going in, so I felt okay for about 30 seconds.”
“BFS was the obvious move and I got there fine.”
“Spent the first few minutes just drawing out the [2,2,1,2,1] example trying to convince myself I understood what a horizontal stroke even meant physically.”
“I started by trying to break down the surface area of the Earth, then guessed at image resolution and coverage overlap.”
“The leaf case and one-child case felt fine, but I fumbled a bit explaining the two-child case live.”
“I blanked for a second because I'd only ever prepped for 'favorite product' questions.”
“Went iterative instead of trying to split the string recursively.”