Questions entretien chez Google

Candidature

J'ai postulé via une recommandation d'un employé. Le processus a pris 4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien à Google (Mountain View, CA (États-Unis)) en avril 2014.

Entretien

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks.

The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple:
1) Dynamic Programming
2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs)
3) Probability related programs
4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough
5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,...
6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up.
7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape.
8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought.
9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience.
10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math.
11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know.
12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too!

Interview 1:
Graph related question and super recursion

Interview 2:
Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel.

Interview 3:
Array and Tree related questions

Interview 4:
Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs.

Interview 5:
Dynamic programming,
Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc.

At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems).

Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."

Candidature

J'ai postulé via un établissement de l'enseignement supérieur ou universitaire.. Le processus a pris 2 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien à Google en avril 2015.

Entretien

Phone interview:
The Interviewer was late for 20 mins... Ask nothing on my resume.
Tow questions:
1) A string consists of ‘0’, ‘1’ and '?'. The question mark can be either '0' or '1'. Find all possible combinations for a string.
2) Give you a text file, remove duplicated lines.
    Follow up: If the file is very large, general hash map takes too much spaces, come up with a better solution.

Entretien

I wish, I had the following information when I walked into my phone screen, hopefully it will help someone out there.

Here is the format of my 1st phone screen with a PM (45 minutes long).

* Interviewer talks about his/her background (3~5 mins)
* Two general questions - tell me about yourself and why do you want to work here? (5 ~ 10 mins)
* Product questions - design and strategy (25~30 mins)
* Questions for the interviewer (last 5 mins)

My interviewer asked me 3 product questions so you are looking at 10~15 minutes per question.

I was caught off guard when my interviewer cut me short while I was flushing out solutions for a product design.

My recommendation, ask your interviewer how much time you have for the question or roughly how many product questions they have in mind so that you are not caught off guard like me.

On average, if the interviewer expects you to take 15 minutes for a product design problem then you don't have a lot of time for each of the below steps. You probably want to focus most of your attention on pain points and design (5 mins each).

* Define the user personas
* Define the pain points
* Prioritize the pain points
* Brain storm the solutions for the pain points
* Come up with a rough design for the solution
* Define success metrics for your solution

Product design is an iterative process, you will find better user personas, pain points and solutions as you go through the process. Be mindful about getting stuck in analysis paralysis and remember to touch on the key elements of the process.

Good luck, the process is not perfect, don't beat yourself up if you don't make it.

Entretien

Heavily behavioral/P.M. based questions; one technical question of easy-medium difficulty. The focus is definitely the Behavioral part. I passed thankfully. Unfortunately this was in the Summer of Corona, so they froze all projects before the final interview

Candidature

J'ai postulé en ligne. J'ai passé un entretien à Google.

Entretien

Engaging and easy to follow interview process. Scheduling and expectations were all clearly set. The interview itself was fairly straight forward and dealt with working knowledge of Google products and services.

Entretien

Interview was 3 hours long and intense but great questions and everyone was super polite. I flew to SF and interviewed in person there for a job that was in LA. I was bummed that I didn't get to interview with my hiring manager directly.

Entretien

Quick and easy. The interviewers and recruiters were great and very nice. Phone interviews aren’t as good as in person interviews but given remote work that will probably be the norm going forwards.

Candidature

J'ai postulé en ligne. J'ai passé un entretien à Google.

Entretien

I was contacted by a recruiter, sent them an updated resume. And then was told I did not have the technical chops for the position.

The expectation for a Technical Writer to write code in a number of different languages is pretty high. If I wrote code like that, I would be a software developer.

Entretien

The hiring and interview process was very well organized; I enjoyed the sample writing prompt exercise but make sure to be as detailed as possible (the time limit is a bit too short)

Entretien

quick, efficient. A bit overly focused on process and not human interaction. disappointed in one or two interviewer who seemed a bit on edge and maybe had a bad day.