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Software Engineer Interview Experience

January 29, 2015
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I only had two phone interviews.

The first one was fairly easy:

  • What is the time complexity of quicksort?
  • Inserting into a binary tree?

The second one was a coding problem.

Questions

You are given an n by n array filled with '0's, and you have to set randomly X number of '1's in that array.

Looping and generating X random numbers doesn't work as you might get the same random number. Collisions will become more likely, especially as X gets closer to n*n. In such cases, you'll loop for a very long time before filling all the '1's.

All positions must have the same probability of being selected, and the array might be huge.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 3,820 interview experiences for the Google Software Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

12%
Pass Rate

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

Experience Rating

Positive59%
Neutral29%
Negative12%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Google's Software Engineer interview process in United States.

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