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Software Engineer Interview Experience - Mountain View, California

March 1, 2010
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I submitted my resume online. About three weeks later, I received a call from a recruiter who asked me about my experience and the kind of role I would like. She then arranged a phone screening for me.

During the screening, I was asked three main questions: two coding-related and one about how web pages are retrieved and displayed, and how that process can be optimized.

Questions

Write an algorithm to calculate n factorial.

Explain the steps involved from entering a website address to the page being displayed on your browser. How can the process be sped up?

  • Fixing basic spelling and grammar mistakes
  • Adding newlines and spacing as appropriate
  • Formatting lists with bullet points when they're there but in plain text
  • Adding newlines in appropriate places to make things seem less "wall-of-text"-ey
  • For numbered or bulleted lists, keep the list items close together without extra newlines between each point
  • Do not bother formatting into a bulleted list if there are not at least 2 items to display.

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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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