Google Interview Experience for SWE Intern

Round 1

Resume Shortlisting, 50 students shortlisted | Make sure to include Kickstart, CodeJam, Leetcode, Codeforces, Codechef, and GFG Ratings/ Problems/ Contest ratings in it. Many of the excellent candidates didn’t include this, and their resume was rejected (we were not told the criteria but most of them implemented this). Include your Competitive Programming and CP Profiles Ratings, achievement, and ranks in extracurricular or achievement, so that it passes the ATS Software which they have set up.

Round 2

Coding Round. HackerEarth.

2 Problems | 1 hour

Problem-1: Given a string, you can remove a sequence of consecutive repeating characters- find minimum operations to make the string empty. For example: if you have a string “baaab”, operations will be 2, in the first operation you will remove “aaa”, in the next operation, the string becomes “bb”, now you can remove it completely, so 2 operations. Expected Time Complexity- O(N).

Problem-2: Given a binary string, count the number of distinct decimal subsequences that can be generated from the given string. Answer will be mod 10^9+7.
Suppose, string = “011”, output = 3, Distinct Decimal Subsequences = {“0″,”1″,”11”} , Expected Time Complexity- O(N)

I could solve only 1 question and was selected.

Round 3 (Interview Round-1 Technical)

Google Meet | Codeshare to write code

DSA Problem: Max Subarray Sum with 1st and last elements same having only Positive Numbers.

Discussion on Time and Space Complexity. He modified the question later for Negative Numbers.

Some discussion on my Projects and Cloud Services took place (I had an AWS S3-hosted Project, so we discussed that)

Round 4 (Interview Round-4 Technical)

Discussion on Projects and some basic concepts of Cloud Services and AWS.

Later, I was asked about the Strange Printer-2 Problem. There is a strange printer with the following two special requirements:

• On each turn, the printer will print a solid rectangular pattern of a single color on the grid. This will cover up the existing colors in the rectangle.
• Once the printer has used color for the above operation, the same color cannot be used again.

You are given a m x n matrix, where each cell is the color. Return true if it is possible to print the matrix, otherwise, return false.

I solved the problem recursively first (exponential time complexity). The interviewer expected to optimize it. I took this as a DP Problem but in reality, it was a Topological Sort and Graph. I was not able to optimize it. The interview lasted 45 minutes.

VERDICT: Rejected in the last round