Google Interview Experience for Software Engineer 2021 New Grad

I was contacted by a Google recruiter a few months ago, that my resume has been shortlisted for the Software Engineer 2021 New Grad Role. I was provided with the next action steps of how to proceed with the next round of interviews – Technical Phone Interview which is generally 45 minutes.

I wasn’t able to grab the offer, but I really hope that my experience and feedback about this whole process would help you as much as it helped me.

Usually, the recruiter asks about your preferable date and time for the interview, also they furnish you with some beneficial extra tips and information that you should know.

Round 1(Technical Phone Interview): I was asked about my recent project mentioned in the CV , there was a good discussion about it, for say 5 minutes. After that I was given a coding question to solve : 

Given an N-ary Tree, find out the average width of each of the nodes present in that tree.

Note: A node can have ‘N’ number of children

Explanation: Consider the above tree, for node 1 , the average width would be the total no. of nodes under that node ie. 7 (including the target node) divided by the total number of levels under the parent node (7/3) .

The format of the answer should be: [node number : average width of that node ] that is ,for the given tree the answer is :

[ 1 : 2.5 , 2 : 1.5 , 3 : 1.5 , 4 : 1 , 5 : 1 , 6 : 1 , 7 : 1 ]

I was able to come up with a brute-force approach ONLY within that remaining time.

The interviewer was quite polite, interactive, and helped me with my initial queries against the given problem statement. One thing to note over here is while your interviewer is helping you clear the doubts and landing on a meaningful solution, it also means that you are getting a penalty for not being selected. It’s a fact ! 

Good luck to you, if you are appearing/preparing for interviews! Sometimes it’s your day, sometimes it isn’t. 🙂

Do not give up