Guys, this post is not out of frustration or because I am upset about being rejected. Google is an amazing place to work, and I really respect its standards and hiring bar.

I interviewed before with Google for an internship (software) role and know that I bombed those interviews, hence I didn't feel anything about the rejection.

Please read about what happened when I interviewed for the SETI role at Google on February 22, 2019.

Phone Screen: DP - Something similar to the coin change problem. Proceeded for onsite.

Onsite Interviews (4 technical):

1. Check if a subsequence of a string appears in another string. Find the shortest such subsequence.

2. Given a graph data structure with one extra edge that violates the tree property, find everything else. Ans: Gave him two approaches: one using disjoint set and the other using just the DFS approach. Coded them and explained time complexities.

3. Third round: Given an n-ary tree and a node, find the sum of the subtree down from that node. Set up a simple recursion to solve this problem. Next, given a list of N-ary nodes, can you find the root of the n-ary trees? Solved it by iterating the list and caching the children nodes of each n-ary node in a set. Then check for the n-ary node which doesn't belong in the set. Solved it. Next, given two strings with backspace characters in them, like 'a, <-, b, c' amounts to 'bc' because you backspaced after 'a'. Now, given two such strings, find if they are both the same, solved in an O(n) approach. So, three questions, then we were done.

4. Fourth round: Given an n-ary tree with each edge having some values. Now consider you drop water on the top of this tree, and it trickles down to the leaves. The edge values correspond to stickiness. Find the latest time by which it will reach the leaves. I answered by stating that you have to find the path with the maximum sum from root to leaf. Solved it using recursion. O(n). Next, asked me a design question: If you have a hashmap and have stored some values in it, and each has a TTL (time to live) after which they should be removed, how would you design a new data structure to support these operations? I answered that it's very open-ended, and the interviewer was okay with this. Coded it.

Four rounds. The first one didn't go as well as the others did, but everything else was beyond just 'I did okay'. I finished my interview on Friday at 3 p.m. Came back home. Monday morning, I got an email from the recruiter saying she has an outcome and would like to discuss it more, and she'll call me on Tuesday. Had my hopes high (for a reason); you can read the post above. Tuesday morning, she said, 'Sorry, the team didn't think you'd be a good fit for the role. Other teams might want to reach out.'