I was contacted by a recruiter via Randstad who laid out the process in a ton of detail. I was told that the first step would be a 45-minute coding interview over the phone, using a collaborative plain text document with the interviewer.

I spent a month prepping for this, only to be paired up with a Google engineer who was blatantly prejudiced against engineers with a bootcamp background. You may be asking, "How could you know that?"

The interviewer started off the interview grumbling about how it should be a video interview and not a phone interview. He then told me that it would be an hour instead of 45 minutes.

He proceeded to spend the first 35 minutes prodding me with random technical trivia. He even went as far as asking me to write SQL queries for a hypothetical database, since my pre-bootcamp background was analytics. He even pulled up my GitHub to ask me about random bits of code from a project from three years ago.

After 35 minutes, I cut him off to tell him that the content of this interview was not at all what was described to me. He scoffed and told me that everything he was asking was necessary to succeed at Google. He essentially taunted me, saying, "Okay, you want a LeetCode question? Here."

The coding question I was given was LeetCode Easy and was wrapped up in five minutes. After that, my interviewer half-heartedly answered canned questions I had and left the call.

I described this experience to my recruiter in detail and was assured that they would look into why the interviewer didn't follow the standard format for the interview. I followed up a few days later and was told that no one had looked into it, but the interviewer gave negative feedback. I was then offered the chance to redo the first round if I believed the process wasn't fair to me.

Upon providing availability to redo the first round interview, I was then blown off. The recruiter cited the hiring freeze, even though I was previously told that the hiring freeze would have no effect on the interviewing process and only on the potential start date.

TLDR: If you are a bootcamp engineer, your mileage may vary when interviewing at Google, as I imagine prejudice against non-traditional engineering backgrounds isn't uncommon at FAANG.

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