The Google interviewing process is lengthy and slow. The steps I experienced were:

• Recruiter phone screen
• Coding challenge
• Technical phone interview
• Onsite (4 rounds of 45-minute interviews)

Roughly two to three weeks passed between each step, so the entire process took about two months.

The phone screens and coding challenge were quite easy, featuring typical DFS or integer array/string manipulation questions. Studying Hackerrank/Leetcode should prepare you adequately.

My onsite experience was a nightmare and, honestly, a terrible experience. The questions themselves were not difficult, and I solved most of them in time, even making optimizations. However, the process was severely flawed.

I was given the incorrect building and no schedule for the morning, leaving me unsure where to go. I had four technical interviewers and one lunch interviewer. The first two technical interviewers were pleasant and engaged. Unfortunately, the third and fourth interviewers significantly diminished my interest in working at Google.

The third interviewer was disengaged, frequently checking his phone and writing emails while I was at the whiteboard. The fourth interviewer also seemed inattentive to my work and was unresponsive to my questions at the end; they were not very sociable.

My lunch interviewer was a kind woman, but she was uninformed about the schedule. Because I hadn't received one, she mistakenly believed our lunch was longer than scheduled, causing me to be twenty minutes late for my final interview.

This delay, combined with the difficulty of reaching the Google campus (Google only reimburses local candidates $60, making travel without a car challenging), significantly reduced my enthusiasm for working there.

Given two identical strings, where one string has a random character inserted, return the random inserted character.