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Software Engineer Interview Experience - Mountain View, California

September 1, 2016
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Had one phone screen and five onsite interviews.

Interviewers ensured understanding of questions and focused on fundamentals rather than specific topics or programming languages.

Topics covered:

  • Coding
  • Networks
  • Cryptography
  • Data structures
  • Algorithms
  • Complexity analysis

Questions

Interview Questions

Interview 1

  1. Given an array of numbers from 0 to 99 with some missing numbers. Find the missing numbers and print them as a string, e.g., "0-2, 5, 25-30, 85-90".
  2. You have 100cm of pavement and 1cm long raindrops. These can fall on top of each other at any fraction. Use a random number generator to simulate when the pavement will get fully wet.

Interview 2

  • Resume Questions
  • Questions on SSL certificates
  • What is a Man-in-the-Middle attack? How is it avoided by SSL HS?
  • TCP congestion control

Interview 3 Given a set of points on a Cartesian plane, return two points such that when a line is drawn through them, the rest of the points can be divided into two sets with an equal number of elements.

Interview 4 Implement a Queue using a Stack. Write Push, Pop, Front, and Empty functions.

Interview 5 Given a large file with sentences and a query string, design a system (classes, data structures, functions, etc.) and an algorithm to return the smallest window (start and end offsets) in the input file where the query words (in any order) are present in the text file.

  • What is the time complexity of the solution?
  • Jot down the class for solving this.

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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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