Google Interview Experience For SDE 2023

I have several years of experience as a Software Development Engineer (SDE). Initially, I worked at a media conglomerate, working as a full-stack developer. Later, I transitioned to a SAAS company, where I honed my skills further. Currently, I am employed at a leading fintech company.

A Google recruiter reached out to me regarding a role. While my expertise didn’t include Java or angular, the recruiter assured me that the tech stack was not a barrier—as long as I performed well in the interview rounds.

Total no of rounds -6

Round 1:

Mostly just long telephone conversations with the recruiter trying to know more about me, my experiences, my tech stack etc.

Round 2:

It was a video interview with a developer from Singapore. it was the most chill round of them all, I was given a JS compiler with no auto-correct or code completion capabilities. The problem was simple
” Find all matches of a small string str2 in a big string str1″
I showed the most naïve solution and then sequentially made it better, he wanted me to explain how it works so I had to do a little whiteboarding where I explained the whole flow of the algorithm right down to creating hashes. Then I had to explain the big o notation, and why it’s linear. etc. By the time we finished the discussion almost 45 minutes were over I thought I’d get another question but that didn’t happen.

Round 3:

Again a video interview with someone from the US. As I was only free after my regular work I didn’t receive any Indian interviewers. Most of my interviews were at 9 pm or 10 pm IST. He explained to me a problem statement, which resulted in a rope or cord data structure. ( ref wiki).
once I implemented the structure the questions were;

• Find out the length of both ends from a given node
• Find substrings (i,j) from the structure etc.

Round 4:

This round was with someone from Zurich, and it was the same question but explained differently. I think they don’t communicate previous rounds’ details with the panelists, so I was lucky to be getting the same question again, I was prepared this time but the queries were a little different.

• Find out if two cords are the same or different
• Find if a cord contains another etc.

Round 5:

This was the most hectic round as we kept coming back and forth with problems and solutions. The question statement boils down to this
“Given a stream of share market data with potential updates to older values, how can we efficiently find the maximum, minimum, and current values?”
I came up with lots of different solutions to this, some were more space-optimized, while some were more time-optimized. but I could sense he wasn’t totally satisfied, so we ended the interview on a bittersweet note and I realized it was a bad one.

Round 6:

The last round is called the googlyness round. it was the round I enjoyed most as there was not much to prepare we sat down a had a chat about my experiences. The questions were like this

• Share your most cherished accomplishments in your career.
• Describe the most challenging moments you’ve faced in your career.
• Highlight instances where you demonstrated strong leadership.
• Recall moments when you exhibited courage by challenging the status quo.
• Discuss how you’ve fostered inclusion within your team. and similar things.

Preparing the folder: after the interviews were done the recruiter told me the feedback and the ratings after each round. So I had a mental image of the folder. Since one of my rounds went bad, it wasn’t looking good. Still, I managed to get a referral from one of my friends in Google as I was told that helps.
After a few weeks, the recruiter reached out saying no managers were willing to accept my folder and that I should try again after 6 months but I moved abroad after a few months and lost interest.
Even though I wasn’t selected it was an overall positive experience for me and the recruiter was helpful every step of the way.