My Experience: Failed Google interview
Hey all, just wanted to add here about the first interview round that I had with Google. I can't disclose the exact question but it was a Topological Sort Graph based problem (something like Course Schedule on Leetcode). I almost got the approach right but there was a bug in my code and not enough time to solve it. I solved approx 150 Leetcode problems before the interview (except DP).
I am a bit disappointed since the interviewer mentioned at the end of my interview that my code seems fine but there is a bug and we have to stop since we are out of time, but the recruiter called me a day later and said that I got "Below Average" rating in most categories like Coding, debugging, etc. This is confusing me a bit as I have two different reviews. The code I wrote was the optimal solution (with a bug) and I verified it on Leetcode too. I am not sure how objective interviewers are at Google (or big tech) in their evaluation as I felt that my code was not bad at all. This is not to say that my interviewer or recruiter were bad, they were actually pretty great and friendly.
Please let me know what your interview experience has been in big tech since this was my first time, and how much luck is involved, interviewer's mood, etc matter here.
Talking product sense with Ridhi
9 min AI interview5 questions
Well in the past, in a Google interview, I was given a lean no hire because I declared a global variable instead of passing around the variable for recursion (which I fixed right away when the interviewer pointed out). It led to downlevelling me. I ended up rejecting the offer.
It'll all depend on the interviewer.
I recently gave L4 interviews . It was quite easy and I breezed past all the questions except in 1 interview the interviewer asked me a problem for which I used dfs to solve , but he wasn’t happy. He wanted me to use RValue references and std::move semantics which I got to know only recently, so obviously I bombed hard lol.
Ended up getting offer for L3 which I had to reject due to compensation issues .
What compensation did they offer?
Does tech stack matter?
No, they ask questions which are language agnostic.
how did you applied, was it a referal, your yoe?
4yoe, I applied online and recruiter reached out to me.