A recruiter contacted me via my old school email, stating they had my resume on file from an interview a couple of years ago.

I spoke with the recruiter very briefly over the phone. He described the role and asked if it was something I would be interested in, as it seemed like a very heavy software coding role. I confirmed my interest, and then he asked me to send an updated resume, after which he would set up a phone interview.

The phone interview was scheduled for a week later.

The interviewer called on a very poor phone line, and was likely on speakerphone. Fortunately, we moved to a Google Doc that was set up for the interview, and when I couldn't understand the interviewer, he would type the information in the doc.

The interview was fairly straightforward. The interviewer asked three questions: two dealing with arrays and one dealing with a linked list.

I struggled a bit with the first question. I worked through it, and the interviewer then asked typical time complexity questions and how to optimize the solution.

For the second question, I struggled for about five minutes to come up with a solution. I was explaining my thought process to the interviewer as I tried to devise a way to solve the problem, which seemed to confuse him. He asked if I would just code it, but I wasn't coding it because I had no ideas yet on how to solve the problem.

After about another minute, I came up with a solution. I started coding it, and once the interviewer saw that I had a solution and could code it without issues, he asked me to move on to another question. This was the linked list question, and I knew a solution immediately and coded it without any problems.

Somewhere during the interview, he asked me, "Do you have experience designing backend databases?" This is a question I would typically expect for a DBA role, not a standard software engineer interview. Regardless, I answered him, and that was pretty much the end of the interview. He asked if I had any questions, which I did, and he provided a good response.

This was my second interview with Google; the first one was a disaster, so I was quite pleased with the outcome of this one. I struggled a bit, but was able to answer the questions.

Two weeks later, I emailed the recruiter to ask if he had heard any results from the interview. He set up a time to talk, and when he called, he told me that I had performed well in the interview but that they had found another candidate better suited for the position.

Overall, it was a pretty good experience.

Randomize an array, ensuring no items are in the same position they were in originally.