← Back to Directory

Google interview notes, page 93 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·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google PM interview, one question about experiment design. Pretty technical for a product role but not shocking given the company.
  • How do you figure out the right sample size for an A/B test?

“I knew the basics (statistical power, significance threshold, baseline conversion rate) but fumbled a bit when trying to explain the tradeoffs between running a test longer vs.”

View Post

Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google PM interview with a classic Fermi estimation question. Nothing too wild, but these always mess with me more than they should.
  • Estimate the circumference of the Earth at the Equator.

“I blanked for a second and just started talking through what I remembered from school.”

View Post

Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Got a product sense question at Google about designing a hotel lobby for seniors. Pretty open-ended, no obvious right answer, and I'm still not sure I nailed it.
  • You're designing a hotel for senior citizens. How would you approach the lobby design?

“I jumped straight into accessibility features and kind of listed things off the top of my head.”

View Post

Google·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Google data scientist interview with a meaty stats/ML design question about human review allocation. No fluff, just one deep problem and a lot of follow-ups.
  • You need to estimate an ML classifier's accuracy on a population, and you have a fixed budget of K human reviews. Each review gives a binary judgment. Do you spread those K reviews across K different subjects (one review each), or concentrate them on fewer subjects with multiple reviews per subject and aggregate via majority vote? Make a statistical argument, discuss bias and variance, and describe how you'd build a confidence interval around your estimate.

“This one took me a minute to even set up properly.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role. Just one question but it had a follow-up that made it way more interesting than I expected.
  • You're working at a company with a toxic culture and poor work-life balance. What would you do to improve things? Follow-up: if you were the one leading that company, what would your approach be?

“The first part felt manageable.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineering role. Just one question but they really sat with it, lots of follow-ups about the specifics of what I dropped and why.
  • Describe a time you were juggling a lot at once. What did you prioritize, what did you let slide or hand off, and how did it turn out?

“I had a decent story ready but fumbled the middle part where I explained what I actually deprioritized.”

View Post

Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google product design interview, one question about rethinking the in-flight experience. Not much context to go on from what was shared.
  • How would you redesign the in-flight experience?

“Classic open-ended product design question and I went way too broad at first.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Google for a software engineer role. Five questions, all structured around past experiences, with follow-ups pushing for numbers and specifics. Nothing technically surprising but the depth expected on each answer was real.
  • Tell me about a time a colleague was uncooperative and how you handled it.
  • Describe a situation where you faced a problem with no clear solution. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
  • Tell me about a time something at work went differently than you expected and how you responded.
  • Tell me about something new you learned and how you applied it in your work.
  • Tell me about a time you missed a goal you set for yourself. Why did it happen and what did you take away from it?

“This one I actually felt okay about.”

View Post

Google·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Google PM interview with a Spotify-as-the-product metrics question. Not a ton of context to go on, but it's the kind of question that sounds easy until you're actually in the room trying to decide what matters.
  • If you were the PM for Spotify, what metrics would you prioritize and why?

“My first instinct was to go straight to MAUs and skip count, which in hindsight was pretty surface level.”

View Post

Google·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Google SWE coding round, two questions back to back. First one felt like a heap problem dressed up with extra sorting rules, second was a binary search question that I almost overcomplicated. Neither was brutal but both had enough edge cases to trip you up if you moved too fast.
  • Given an array of 2D points that may contain duplicates, return the top K distinct points ranked by frequency (descending), then by squared distance to the origin (ascending) as a tiebreaker, then by x and y coordinates ascending if still tied.
  • Design a time-based key-value store that supports storing values with timestamps and retrieving the value whose timestamp is closest to a given query timestamp, with ties broken in favor of the smaller timestamp.

“My first instinct was a hash map for counts, then sort.”

View Post