Google Interview Experience For SWE Intern (Off-Campus) 2023

I applied for the position of Google SWE summer intern-2023 via the Google Careers site and the application was without a referral.

Before we begin: ONLY DSA Questions were asked in the 3 technical rounds. Not a single question related to OS, DBMS, CN, OOP, or System design was asked. So now you know what to focus on. Questions related to OOPs, DBMS, and the project I mentioned in my resume were asked in the 2 telephonic rounds preceding the technical rounds.

REF:

[OOPS: Saurabh Shukla YT Channel and notes you make in college more than enough]

[DBMS: Gate Smashers YT Channel]

After resume shortlisting, I received an email from a recruiter stating that she wanted to conduct a telephonic round. The telephonic round lasted for 25-30 minutes.

Telephonic Round 1:

The first telephonic round started with a basic introduction of myself and then straight off with all the topics I mentioned in my resume like OOPs, DBMS, and projects. Since my project’s main tech stack was frontend and ML, questions were asked, so it would be best if you go thoroughly through the project mentioned in your resume. The round lasted for around 30 minutes. Soon after I received a mail for a second telephonic round.

Telephonic Round 2:

The second telephonic round like the first started with a basic introduction of myself and then I was asked about some real-life applications of OOPs, and questions related to DBMS (like indexing and normalization) [I had to explain all of them verbally with the help of an example ]. I was asked questions on ML as the project was based on it and then some drawbacks of the project and what unique the project I had mentioned provided. I was also asked to explain the DOM model of JS and was asked to describe in brief several components of React with which I was familiar and why I preferred ReactJS over other frameworks of JS. Soon after I received an email for the technical interview.

[All the technical rounds were held in a virtual platform link which was shared by the recruiter and given access to before the interview by the interviewer]

Technical Round 1:

2 DSA questions were asked which were to be explained first with your logic and then with an example test case which the interviewer provided and once it’s ok then they will ask you to code it up. (After each question you would have to explain the time complexity and space complexity of the code which you came up with)

• 1st Question (Based on Graph and Dijkstra’s Algo). Similar to this question where you had to interpret it , the question was involved around a story based on an employee choosing various work locations of the company he is deciding to join.
• 2nd Question was similar to this. It was basically involved around the Tarjan’ algorithm and checking critical connections in a network of employees provided in the question . (Direct use of the algorithm)

Technical Round 2:

Same format as the previous technical round

• 1st Question was very much this where there was use of the DFS algorithm. Again the question was a bit incomplete as provided by the interviewer you had to ask some questions which the interviewer would then clear out revealing more about the question.
• 2ndQuestion was directly this without any change in the problem statement. A direct standard question using a sliding window and map.

Technical Round 3:

Same format as the previous technical round [This round was around 55 minutes generally Google sticks to its strict 45 minutes].

• 1st Question was similar to this the problem statement was a bit lengthy but the idea was a very simple array of greedy-based questions.
• follow-up on the above question in which there was some cost introduced and there were some additional constraints provided and the final goal was to minimize the cost. A greedy algo question molded into dynamic programming (std medium question).

Some theoretical question was asked at the end, which he said to explain regarding hashing and hash functions and the use of unordered data structures in real-life scenarios in companies and some database-related stuff. How to handle integers of size 10^18 and more with data structures and stuff which I answered but still don’t know whether it was perfect or not.

After a long wait of more than a month, I finally got the selection mail, and the result was informed to me by my recruiter over a Google Meet.

FINAL VERDICT: SELECTED