The interview was way more challenging than I anticipated, especially the technical rounds. I was thrown off by the depth of the DSA questions. One standout was a coding question about finding the median of two sorted arrays, which I recognized instantly — it was the same problem I had worked through on PracHub. The behavioral questions felt less intense, but the overall vibe was stressful. Ultimately, I didn’t receive an offer. It was a tough experience, but I'm grateful for what I learned along the way.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given two sorted arrays of size m and n, find the median of the combined sorted array in O(log(min(m,n))) time.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google
Interview
I was contacted on LinkedIn by a recruiter. They set up a phone interview, (two technical questions) which I passed, and the guy was very easty to talk to and seemed to really love working there. HR set up another phone interview the following week, which I was excited about until I heard the guys accent and my heart sank - I knew this wasn't going to go well.
He spoke with a very thick Indian accent, was completely unpersonable, and extremely short. He gave one-word answers to all of my questions, and most of what he said I couldn't understand due to his accent. He spent absolutely no time learning anything about me or breaking the ice. He called, mentioned his name (I have no idea what it was because I couldn't understand him), and said "Are you ready to start the interview?" Immediately I considered saying I was under the weather and requesting to reschedule (and hopefully get a different interviewer the next time). The fact that this guy even got hired by the company at one point (and especially is *interviewing* people) really surprises me. I mean, at some point he had to talk to someone, right? How did they understand him? I constantly had to ask him to repeat things, and he probably thought I was stupid or stalling.
It's a large company and they make mistakes, which I can forgive. I just wish I had gone through with my plan to reschedule.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions aren't difficult, but they seem to really like linked lists there (just my personal experience). I had a question dealing with reversing pairs of nodes in a doubly-linked list, one essentially implementing an LRU, and two that were simple critical-thinking problems (no data structures required).
The interviewer was very nice, one interviewer didn't show up so I rescheduled it. When I didn't come up with the best solution, the interveiwer was very patient and give me hint as many as possible
1 screening round + 3 onsite round
All rounds were focused on DSA that included topics like strings, linked list, heap and dynamic programming. Screening round had 2 questions on qualifying which I was eligible for onsite and Googliness rounds. The whole process took nearlying 2.5 months
