Phone screen

A chessboard was given where something could move based on some conditions. This suggested DFS/BFS on a 2D array/graph. It wasn't very straightforward, so I'd rate it slightly hard – harder than any of my onsite interviews. Completed within 25-30 minutes.

Difficulty: Hard Verdict: Strong hire

Round 1

A medium-level question based on cards required some operations to check the input and return true/false. The question was a bit confusing due to many conditions. It read like a 500-word essay and was still quite open-ended. No proper input and output were provided. After 10 minutes, I still didn't know I just had to return a boolean based on the input.

The follow-up was difficult. The interviewer again didn't give the question properly and seemed to be looking for some sort of subsequence. I thought she wanted a subarray, so I was giving the wrong approach. Later, she explained a test case that made me realize she wanted a subsequence, and I proposed a DP solution quickly and half-coded it. Overall, this was a bad interview due to a lack of clarity in the questions. Solving both of these questions on LeetCode would take me 15 minutes at most, but with the interviewer leaving out details, things really got messed up. The only way to tackle such interviewers is to clarify things as much as possible by asking questions at the start.

Difficulty: Medium Verdict: Lean hire

Round 2

This was a very standard DP/backtracking question about a piece moving to neighboring cells in a matrix and counting the number of ways to reach a destination. It had two follow-ups. I discussed different tweaks for the follow-ups, and it went quite smoothly. The first question took 15 minutes, and the follow-ups took 20 minutes.

Difficulty: Medium (towards easy, in my opinion) Verdict: Strong hire

Round 3

This was a string manipulation question where you had to return a specific part of the string. You basically just had to traverse the string once and return the answer as expected. There were a good number of if-else statements and edge cases to handle, so it seemed like a nice question to me. I was able to code it quickly, missing just one edge case, which I fixed with a one-line change (this likely took 20 minutes).

After that, I was asked another question for which the interviewer only wanted an approach, not the code. I explained the approach within 4 minutes of her giving the question and wanted to code it, but she wasn't interested (probably because it was super easy). She asked a follow-up on it, and I was able to answer it too.

Difficulty: Medium (towards easy again) Verdict: Hire (I must have missed the 'Strong Hire' because of that one edge case, but I really wish the second question was tougher for me to make up for it).

Googliness

Standard questions asked in Googliness rounds, which can be found on YouTube videos. I wasn't even drilled with follow-ups on my answers. I was asked many questions and was able to answer them in detail within 30 minutes (I spoke really fast). This left 15 minutes to ask my questions. I was able to set a fun mood very easily (Google's positivity is really a vibe, for sure!).

Difficulty: Easy Verdict: Strong Hire

Q: If you don’t get hired at Google, what other companies would you be happy working for?