Google Summer Internship Interview Experience 2023 (Off-Campus)

I gave Google interview for Summer Internship 2024.
I understand that Google makes you wait a lot before giving a final verdict, so I would specify all the dates as close as possible so that you can get an idea on your candidature as well.

So Google rolled out the forms for 2024 Summer Internship in Aug 2023, I filled it on 6th Aug 2023.

Resume screening

On 3rd Sept 2023, A recruiter contacted me via email that my resume has been shortlisted and asked me to book a slot on google meet for a 10mins talk.

I replied immediately by booking a slot for 6th Sept.

HR screening

On 6th Sept, I joined the call. This google recruiter introduced herself and asked me to do the same. She had my resume, so she asked me a few questions on my resume.

• 1. Previous Internship experieThis google recruiterm comfortable in.

The interview ended with her explaining about further steps and a prep talk before interviews.

Just after the meet, I received an email asking for my identification and transcript.

After a few days, I received an invite link for the prep talk.

Pre-interview prep talk

It was a 1 hour session with around 80 other candidates who could clear all their doubts and them explaining on good practices in an interview.

Technical Interview 1

On 12th Sept 2023, I had my first technical round scheduled.
So, I entered the interview room, the interview again started with him giving an introduction about himself. I gave my introduction as well. Then, he asked me to open a google doc link provided to me earlier via mail. This doc has all proper indentation but no option for running/syntax checking.

There was this one question in the doc, which was on scheduling.

Question was somewhat like this,

Given the start and end time of n number of people, your goal is to return a rotation table without overlapping periods representing who is on call during that time. Return “Start time”, “End time” and list of on-call people. Do not include time periods that do not have on-call people.

I approached the problem first with a brute force method, and then I began coding after thinking about it for around 15 to 20 minutes and discussing my solution with the interviewer. I took about 40 minutes to code the lengthy code since I got confused once when writing it. The interviewer assisted me with the coding and whatever trouble I ran into. He asked me if I had any edge cases left in my code at the end, and after giving it some thought, I was able to identify one and possibly come up with a workaround. Considering that the interview had been going on for an hour and fifteen minutes, he did not ask me to code that out.

On 15th Sept, I got a mail from recruiter that they have decided to move forward with my profile for Round 2. I was quite happy since I did not expect this, but in my opinion what helped me to get through this round was:

• Interviewer mainly checks your thought process, so its important for you to think loudly, speak out whatever you are thinking. Interviewer nodding to your approach can give you more confidence as well.
• Even while coding, I kept on communicating what each of my line of code does.
• If you dont remember the sytanx, its not a problem. Interviewer asked me to use tuple, but I did not remember the syntax. So, he copy pasted its syntax for my reference in the same doc.

Technical Interview 2

On 20th Sept, I had my second technical round. I joined the call, interviewer without any introduction directly jumped on the question.

The first question was on Dijkstra Algorithm. I could code communicate my approach and code it out in around 25-30 mins. Then he gave me another question and asked me to come with an approach using the function I wrote in first question. I quickly came up with the approach and could code it in 5 mins. Then he gave me a third question, I could again give an approach but it was sub-optimal this time. So he asked me to think for an optimal solution, I could come with 2-3 different approached but none of them were optimal, it went for around 7-10mins. When I was unable to think of the best answer for the third question, he informed me that it was “just for fun, and not for the interview” and it was now precisely 45 minutes later. He asked me if I had any questions for him, I asked him the approach for the last question, he just gave me an hint , and then I dont know after that why I asked him, “I am just curious, if u are sitting inside google office”, he replied yes with a smile. I was cursing myself for asking that last question lol.

Just after the interview, HR mailed me to provide the transcript and asked me to wait for the final result.

2 months went by I kept on sending mails to the HR asking for an update, and its still in process is what was told to me everytime by her.

On 22nd Nov 2023, I received a call from her, that it is neither a rejection nor a selection, and its just that my profile could not be matched with any ongoing projects they have right now. My aspirations were dashed after waiting so long to hear that, but it also gave me confidence that I had not been rejected atleast for the part (If you are rejected Google sends the rejection mail generally in a week), which motivated me to do well in the upcoming interviews.