The whole process started with a very nice and helpful call with the recruiting staff, who explained everything and answered all my questions. She led me through the whole interview process and scheduled my phone interview.

At the telephone interview itself, I received a call from a Google Software Engineer. He was first of all upset that the hangout did not work, which he told me was of course my fault. After that, he gave me a rough coding question that I could not understand at all. After I asked back a few times, he told me he could not help me in the interview. This made me not confident at all, and I have to say I got a little bit nervous.

Anyway, I started coding and tried to solve a problem that I couldn't really understand from the beginning. I tried to ask a few other questions, but I think the interviewer had other work to do, as he seemed a little bit distracted. After I finished a first answer, I told the interviewer a few times that I was finished now until he reacted. He went quickly to my code and then told me that I had forgotten some aspects that I wasn't asked for in the first place. After 30 minutes of stressful coding and asking back, I finally figured out what was asked of me, but this had required changing the whole code from scratch. So I tried to fix it with 15 minutes left and coded as fast as I could. After exactly 40 minutes (not 45), the interviewer told me that he had seen enough, said goodbye, and hung up.

In summary, I could not grasp what was asked of me in the beginning, although the problem (a simple graph search on a regular grid) itself wasn't hard at all. Of course, I did not get to the next stage because my answer was not good enough. I was really disappointed by the interviewer. He seemed uninterested in explaining the question correctly and was distracted by something else. In my opinion, this is totally inappropriate in an interview process.

Find out if a graph exists in a regular grid (all nodes connected).