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      Software Engineer Interview

      Mar 18, 2009
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      Declined offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Feb 2007

      Interview

      Communication with the company were great. The recruiter was timely in her responses to email queries and was very friendly to deal with. The phone interviews (2) were appropriate in length and in content and the interviewers were only time. The onsite interviews were also well planned and well scheduled, everyone was on time. I had 5 or 6 1:1 interviews during my day and they all asked different types of technical questions. The only nit I would pick was that the focus was entirely technical, it seemed like no one really cared about my personal or career growth or what I really wanted to do. The actual hiring process is what I had the most problem with. Google insists on hiring really smart people and putting them on somewhat random projects. During the interview process they will tell you nothing about what you'll be working on, in fact they don't even know until the day you start! This is ridiculous when you are trying to hire engineers with difficult to find specialty skills. These same people are getting compelling offers from other companies who are willing to let them work on stuff in their domain of expertise and are willing to tell then what they'll work on. Google treats all of its new hires like they are fresh out of college. I.e. they are smart, but have little experience so they'll be ready to just work on anything just because its Google. Sadly this is simply not true of the more experience senior people out there.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Implement a skip list traversal routine. Algorithmic complexity of traversal. Algorithm for converting uniformly distributed random numbers into a logarithmic distribution.
      1 Answer
      5

      Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Google

      Software Engineer Interview

      May 4, 2014
      Anonymous employee
      Auburndale, FL
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google (Auburndale, FL) in Apr 2014

      Interview

      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."
      2501

      Software Engineer Interview

      Jun 3, 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I interviewed at Google

      Interview

      Etapa de RH para filtragem de curriculo e fit inicial, e Screening Técnico com código em leetcode focado em algoritmos, onde o código era feito em um bloco de notas, sem uso de IDEs.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Você conhece sobre Big O notation?
      Answer question

      Software Engineer Interview

      Jun 2, 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Mountain View, CA
      No offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA)

      Interview

      I was a bit nervous since it was my first big interview with a company like this. Wish I could of done better, but thats all learning experience for next time.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      "Design and implement an LRU cache supporting get and put in O(1) average time".
      Answer question

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