I originally was against posting this due to worrying about the impacts it may have on my career, but I felt Google handled my interview process unprofessionally.

After passing my first phone interview, they scheduled a second interview. The day of, I was ready and set to go. I slept well, my brain was fresh, and I was excited. However, I found out the interviewer was sick, so they scheduled it a week later. No big deal.

The next week, I showed up to my interview, and my interviewer was not there. I waited for almost half an hour, and at this point, I was frustrated. It's been over a month, and they are a high-end tech company; how does this happen? Apparently, the time zones were mixed up.

So, they quickly found somebody (I'm not sure if it was my original interviewer or not) and started the interview an hour later. I was already frustrated, but I decided to stick with it. The interview was a complete 180 from the first. The interviewer barely talked to me, was busy messaging other people, not listening to me or hearing my ideas, not answering or clarifying questions well, and overall, I felt he had little to no interest in me. I feel bad luck determined my fate.

The first phone interview was a very lively discussion, throwing out ideas, debating time complexities, and thinking of the best ways to do things. It was fun and interactive. I felt the interviewer really gauged my thought process and liked the way I think. The second interviewer gave me a cold, blank stare the entire time and, as mentioned above, said little to nothing, and barely probed my thinking at all.

I feel that for as big of a company as they are, interviews should be timely and consistent. The interviewer should not be stressed or unfocused and should realize people are putting in huge amounts of time and effort into something they give you 45 minutes to show for it.

I was asked to remove the leaf nodes of a binary tree, one level at a time. As the third question, I was not to remove the parent of the previously removed leaf node in the next iteration unless I had to.