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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience

March 11, 2015
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I initially had two technical interviews by phone that went quite well.

Then I had an onsite interview. I live 10 miles away from their campus, and the interview consisted of six sessions.

Despite the claim that Google no longer uses puzzles in interviews, I found that two out of the six interviews involved solving tedious puzzles. I would say that four of the six sets of interviewers were friendly. One fellow was outright cold, and another was slightly negative.

  • Interviewer 1 (solo): Friendly and enthusiastic.
  • Interviewer 2 (solo): Friendly but not enthusiastic. He seemed to want to hire someone more like himself.
  • Interviewer 3 (solo): Rather cold. He mentioned knowing I had interviewed at YouTube earlier, which felt creepy, especially since the more memorable interviewers at YouTube were also creepy. It was like being reminded of a bad experience. Right after this, he presented a tedious puzzle. While I was solving his puzzle, I felt constantly interrupted and hounded. I wanted to ask him to be quiet, but I judged from his attitude that it could have ended the interview prematurely. In the Q&A part, it was revealed he had never heard of Google's Project Ara. Perhaps he was having a bad day... at my expense.
  • Interviewer 4 (lunchtime casual talk, solo): Friendly and enthusiastic. It was a relief to talk with him after the previous interviewer; a big relief.
  • Interviewer 5 (solo): Moderately friendly. He presented a puzzle, which I solved. I got the feeling he seemed to want to hire someone more like himself.
  • Interviewer 6 (solo): Someone quite like myself. He was the only interviewer to ask intelligent/wise questions and took notes.

To Google's credit, there were no team interviews (that I recall).

Long after the interview, I received emails from Google asking me to help them improve their interview process. That's why I came to Glassdoor.

Questions

Given input data consisting of sets of increasing numbers, match patterns where the sequence of deltas between the numbers matches.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 168 interview experiences for the Google Senior Software Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

10%
Pass Rate

Google's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in the United States is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive50%
Neutral24%
Negative26%

Candidates reported having good feelings for Google's Senior Software Engineer interview process in United States.

Google Work Experiences