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Software Engineer Interview Experience - Mountain View, California

June 1, 2016
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

  1. Resume screen - Ensure you're something resembling qualified; overview the process stages.

  2. Online code sample - One hour, two questions: one easy, one less so.

  3. Phone interview - Code in a shared Google Doc.

  4. On-site interview - Two interviews before lunch and two more after. Individually, not bad, but with only 30-45 minutes in each interview for coding on the whiteboard, speed can be an issue.

  5. Hiring committee - Assuming you don't bomb the on-site interviews, they will review your information and feedback from the individual interviews and make a final decision.

Questions

Without going into detail (NDA), some things that were needed for the coding portions included:

  • String manipulation
  • Dynamic programming
  • Pair tree traversal (and its time complexity)
  • Breadth-first search

Also, be prepared to talk about anything on your resume that might conceivably be of interest to a software engineer.

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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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