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Software Engineer Interview Experience - Mountain View, California

July 1, 2019
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I was brought onsite, skipping the phone screen. There were five 45-minute interviews and a lunch in between.

Two interviews were in the morning, followed by lunch, and then three interviews in the afternoon. One of the five interviews was the "Googlyness" interview; the rest were coding interviews.

Some interviewers are very inexperienced. According to my interviewers, every employee has to conduct interviews after a certain amount of time working there, so the interview quality isn't consistent.

One of the interviewers I had didn't even remember his question off the top of his head. He had to pull out his laptop to find the question he wanted to ask. Whenever I needed to clarify something, he again had to pull out his laptop to find the problem. He wasn't even sure what he was asking.

Often, interviewers would just throw out the questions and let you do whatever you needed to do, then take the picture at the end without any discussion. They also don't seem to write down feedback as soon as possible after interviews, so the process can drag on longer and they might forget details.

It seems to have a lot of flaws in their hiring process. Even though the questions were pretty diverse and fair, there are too many human factors that can mess up the result.

Questions

I'm not going to say the specific questions, but all of them are data structure and algorithm problems.

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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.

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