Taro Logo

Software Engineer Interview Experience - Mountain View, California

January 1, 2015
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Applied online and received a prompt reply within 2 days. The HR scheduled a phone screen. The phone screen went well, and I was called for an onsite interview.

There were about 4 rounds, each an hour long, followed by a luncheon with the staff where they explained the atmosphere and work. The luncheon was friendly, while the onsite interviewers were keen on noting the code from the whiteboard for review. It was difficult to gauge whether I was proceeding in the right direction. I would expect a more one-on-one experience instead of the "solve the problem at hand" attitude from Google. The questions were not as hard as suggested in the reviews. I received a rejection after two weeks.

Questions

Given a string, list the word occurrences in descending order of their frequencies.

Design a mobile number registration scheme. Follow up: what are the possible ways of storing the numbers, and explain their pros and cons.

Given a source and destination in a route with a list of intermediate points in a graph, find the list of intermediate points such that the minimum distance between the two points is x and the number of intermediate points to visit on the route is y.

A log is generated as <jobID, start time, end time>. Write code for a printer class such that the output is in ascending order of jobID, regardless of the time at which it has completed.

Given a string, find the longest substring and its length without repeating characters.

Given an array of numbers, find the largest sum if the array is: a. Non-cyclic b. Cyclic

Was this helpful?

Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 748 interview experiences for the Google Software Engineer role in Mountain View, California.

Success Rate

20%
Pass Rate

Google's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in Mountain View, California is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive64%
Neutral23%
Negative14%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Google's Software Engineer interview process in Mountain View, California.

Google Work Experiences