Applied online with a referral link. After two months, they got back to me with an online coding sample and an HR recruiter to schedule an interview. I filled out a preference form.

I had three over-the-phone interviews. One software engineer, out of the three, I felt came up with a slower solution and was convinced that his was faster by quick sorting, which is slower than O(n), my solution. The other two were great, and all of them asked easy questions compared to other companies' questions.

I felt that the last interview destroyed me since I couldn't see how his solution was faster than mine. I heard this was a bit common amongst many interviews with engineers at Google, but usually, engineers figure out their mistakes too and correct them. This clearly didn't happen with me.

Also, the last engineer was not as talkative as the other two, which was already a red flag since he didn't seem all that interested in me or the interview.

The rejection notice was pretty slow too; it took a few weeks, so I suppose that is to be expected for rejected individuals at Google.

This company is a hit or miss and will auto-reject you if you reapply later (even with more referrals) within a certain time period, which is kind of dumb if you ask me, since they demand more experience in software development, which maybe their engineers should also get before interviewing...

Nevertheless, there were some ups and downs, and from what I can tell from my friends and referrals, the offer is very luck-based since it really depends on the engineers interviewing you.

Best of luck to the interviewee who reads this; you'll need it!

Recursive String Replacement:

Given "11122", replace "12" with "1".

Given "abcbcbbccd", replace "bc" with "ad".