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Software Engineer (Internship) Interview Experience

February 12, 2019
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Process

After applying, I was asked to complete a questionnaire and two timed coding problems online. The problems were relatively straightforward, and not particularly difficult; they involved implementing basic algorithms according to a problem statement.

After this, two technical phone interviews were scheduled, back to back. The interviews themselves occurred almost a month after the individual coding problems, partially due to the holidays. The technical interviews were one-on-one with full-time software engineers at Google, and consisted of about 30 minutes of whiteboarding code in a Google Doc, with 15 minutes split between the beginning and end for introductions and questions.

The technical interviews were more difficult, but otherwise pretty standard. These involved writing code to solve a problem (potentially with a maximum amortized efficiency) while talking through my reasoning.

After completing the technical interviews, I finally reached the project search stage. For this, I completed another questionnaire about my preferences, interests, and experience with different software development topics. I was matched with a potential team and had another phone interview, about one month after the technical interviews. This time, it was with the intern manager of the team.

This interview was much more conversational, giving the intern manager and I a chance to ask and answer questions about ourselves, the team, the project, etc. However, I'm told this can vary based on the intern manager.

Ultimately, I think this was a good, if drawn out, experience. The problems were tricky, but not excessively so, and were interesting to me. I would recommend applying early and reviewing data structures and algorithms in preparation for the interviews.

Questions

How would you test that your solution works correctly?

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 482 interview experiences for the Google Software Engineer (Internship) role in United States.

Success Rate

17%
Pass Rate

Google's interview process for their Software Engineer (Internship) roles in the United States is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive70%
Neutral25%
Negative5%

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

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