I interviewed with Google in May of 2022 and did not receive an offer.

In early May, a friend gave me a referral, and I applied for three different positions. A recruiter contacted me, and we chatted about my recent activities and current situation. I explained that I was on a tight timeline because I was already in the interview process.

She was amazing! She was quick to respond and efficient in scheduling. She leveraged my experience, along with some examples I provided, and helped me proceed directly to the final round of interviews. She then connected me with another recruiter to handle the coordination. The second recruiter was not as quick to respond but remained accommodating and cooperative. We briefly chatted, and he outlined what the interview would entail.

I completed a round of five interviews:

• Three coding style interviews, each 45 minutes long.
• One systems design interview, which lasted an hour.
• One behavioral or personality interview, which was 45 minutes.

I was 15 minutes late to the first coding interview, which was a poor start. This was due to insufficient communication with the recruiter. I failed that coding challenge but successfully solved the others.

The systems design interviewer was my favorite. He was clearly passionate about systems design and enjoyed discussing it. He asked me to expand on the design from top to bottom of the stack and to consider it at different scales. It was a very engaging thought experiment.

There was one interviewer who clearly wasn't paying attention. After I finished explaining the code, I waited a full minute while she scanned her other screen. She then asked me to explain it again and inquired if the code missed an edge case that I had just explained twice.

Overall, the interview process was interesting. I was told that they believed it was not the right time for me to join. Perhaps that is true for me as well. I am not certain I would have joined at that moment either.

Palindrome Partitioning

What is a stack?

Some questions about front-end development and database questions.