I was contacted by a recruiter a couple of weeks after winning a university Hackathon. The recruiter mentioned he found me through the event.

I proceeded to a quick phone interview where the Software Engineer role at Google was described, and a phone screen was scheduled. The challenge was to code a very simple mathematical operation. Then, I was asked to make the solution recursive. Afterward, I was asked to improve the runtime, and then further improve the memory complexity. It was a fun exercise. The code was shared through a Google Doc.

After the phone screen, I was invited on-site for four interviews.

The on-site interviews went well enough that my application advanced to the hiring committee. They then scheduled me for two additional phone interviews. I felt quite lucky to reach this stage, especially after reading about how the committee often discards applicants when a consensus 'yes' cannot be reached.

However, the interviewer in the first follow-up interview clearly did not want to be there. He was quite dismissive and attempted to end the interview as quickly as possible. The second interview went much better.

It took two weeks for one of the interviewers to submit their feedback. I can only guess which one took so long.

In the end, I did not receive an offer.

I rated the experience negatively because the process took a very long time. I was first contacted in early March and did not receive the official rejection until mid-June.

1. Implement x to the power y as a function (x^y).
2. Write the solution in recursive form.
3. Improve for O(log n) run time.
4. Improve for O(1) spatial complexity (hint: tail recursion).