The interview process began when a technical recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn or email. I had one initial call with the recruiter, and then it was off to the interview races—no phone screen prior to that in my case; I'm not sure if this is typical.

About two weeks after the call with my recruiter, I participated in five virtual interviews over the course of two days. They gave me the option to do the interviews all in one day or split them into two days. Three of these consisted of coding problems (algos & data structures), one consisted of assessing my domain knowledge (iOS-specific questions), and the last interview was personality-based, assessing workplace professionalism and, I imagine, how well I would fit into Google.

I thought the overall interview process was great. In my case, I somewhat underperformed in the CS fundamentals category but performed very well in the domain knowledge category. I did not receive feedback on my performance in the personality category.

A few days after my interviews, I received a call from my recruiter stating that Google would not be moving forward with me and provided feedback as to why. Of the feedback I received, I was told I "almost" got the position on the basis that my domain knowledge was very strong, but my CS fundamentals could have been better. My recruiter explained that Google typically cares more about your domain knowledge versus your CS fundamental knowledge, but CS fundamentals are still very important to them. Also, it was explained to me in more or less words that if you do not receive a call back from your recruiter, it means you did really badly on your interviews—FYI, heads up.

I would also like to pass on one last thing I learned from my feedback session with my recruiter: about 75% of the engineers currently at Google also did not receive an offer their first time interviewing with the company, which I found very interesting and somewhat uplifting, so I thought I would share.

This was all based on my interview with the company in the winter of 2022.

1. Given the following matrix, find the shortest path for a robot to get from (0, 0) to (6, 4). (These are x, y coordinates, by the way.) The zeros in the matrix represent occupy-able positions, and the ones represent un-occupy-able positions. The robot cannot move diagonally.

[[0,1,0,1,1,0,1], [0,1,1,1,1,0,1], [0,0,0,1,1,0,1], [1,1,0,1,1,0,1], [0,1,0,0,0,0,0]]

1. Tell me about a time when you were faced with an obstacle (professional or otherwise) and how you overcame it.