A recruiter reached out to me during the summer. First, I completed the coding challenge, which I found to be decently challenging. However, I've heard they will still pass you through even if you do not finish. After that, I went straight to the on-site interviews. Apparently, for some new grads, they skip the two phone interviews.

On-site was pretty standard. There were four interviews with lunch in between, all completely technical. Three were standard data structure and algorithm problems, and one involved a simpler problem but with more follow-ups, such as how to scale it.

As for the difficulty, I felt it wasn't as hard as Google is generally made out to be; perhaps more like LeetCode medium. However, I do think that part of this was just me getting lucky, as some people I know who also interviewed for new grad positions had much harder interviews. Otherwise, the interviews were alright. Two of the interviewers seemed fairly engaged, while the other two were more disengaged. For the first interview, I didn't really understand where we were going at all and I kind of just nodded along.

The turnaround was fairly slow, as is always the case with larger companies. I heard back that I had passed the hiring committee in two or three weeks. Next, I matched with a product area (something like Google Cloud, not a specific team, as I've heard it was done more traditionally in the past) and went through executive approval, which was very fast.

How would you scale a part of the problem if that part was too large to fit onto one machine?