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Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

October 1, 2014
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Applied online and received a response within a week with a request for an online coding problem, which can be solved in 20 minutes.

I passed it and had a phone interview within that month. This was also not that difficult, but it did go through some basic concepts such as OOP design and principles. The coding question was straightforward as well, as long as you know how to deal with I/O, strings, and basic programming. Then I received a phone call from the recruiter the other day, and I was told the phone interview went well and the next step was onsite.

Onsite interviews were cool. There were 4 rounds, and every round was interesting. We talked much about OOP design and explored potential issues that may occur if I chose a bad design. The programming problems were not that difficult if you have practiced with enough coding interview problems. I did a bad job in the last round, where I was asked to implement functions of a self-designed data structure. I was kind of tired and did not understand the functionality until I coded it through, and of course, I made several mistakes that made my interviewer believe I "catch" things slowly.

After 2 weeks, I received a notification phone call informing me that I was rejected, with a slight disadvantage.

Questions

OOP design issues, linked list, IO, recursion, DP, and a little bit of system design discussion. Very straightforward. Most discussions are open-ended.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 142 interview experiences for the Google Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

9%
Pass Rate

Google's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive55%
Neutral28%
Negative17%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Google's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

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