I was contacted by a recruiter to schedule the interviews. You can really decide the date and take the time you need to prepare for it.

I had two 45-minute Hangouts. The interviewer went straight to the coding question, using a Google Doc to support writing the code.

Then I had the onsite in Zurich. It consisted of four 45-minute interviews back-to-back, with a lunch break in the middle. The person who joins you for lunch won't submit feedback, so you can really enjoy the meal!

Every interview had the same structure: no introduction, and the coding question was asked at the very beginning. You can choose to use either the whiteboard or a Chromebook.

I would suggest finding the almost optimal solution directly, without mentioning "brute force" solutions. This is because you would lose time discussing them and have less time for the coding part.

For the coding part, you should be really fast to demonstrate that you master the language of your choice. I would recommend using the language you use in your day-to-day work, as it can really make a difference.

Please make sure to review the code you write, considering all edge cases and limitations. Remember also to validate the input.

At the end of the interviews, you will have two to three minutes for questions.

The interviewers will take note of everything you say and write. In case of whiteboard coding, they will take some pictures.

The questions were completely new to me, difficult but not impossible.

Overall, it was a great experience, and I would recommend to everyone interested in working at Google to try it at least once in their life. Personally, I would try it again.

Given an array of integers, implement a class to take a snapshot.

In particular, there are 2 methods:

• int takeSnapshot(): Returns the snapshot ID.
• int getFromSnapshot(int snapshotId, int arrayIndex): Retrieves a value from a specific snapshot.