Seeing a lot of posts about google interview coding questions. here’s what i got. fyi i interviewed in 2024, so these are recent.

okay so i didn’t get the offer but i finally did the google swe interviews. figured i’d dump what i remember here for anyone prepping bc half the posts i found were either super vague or just “i got the job!!!” and offered no real help lol

first round was fine string parsing + a follow up. not a leetcode copy-paste but like… if you’ve done enough mediums you’d be okay. i froze halfway, interviewer nudged me and i recovered.

second round was graphs. interviewer was friendly but didn’t say much once i started coding. i went with dfs, explained tradeoffs. then they asked me how i’d scale it for millions of nodes and i gave a half-baked answer. pretty sure that’s where i lost them.

third round was a weird one. more like “design a simplified thing” than straight up code. i wrote some logic in python and talked through scaling it but idk. didn’t feel great.

all the google interview coding questions were fair imo. like they’re hard, but not “trick” questions. what they really want is clean logic, fast typing, and crystal clear thinking. also the google doc thing? brutal. no syntax highlighting, no linting. just you and a blank screen and your nerves.

i prepped using the usual google engineering interview questions from blind/glassdoor, but honestly those weren’t enough. what killed me was the follow-ups. they always ask “can this be faster?” or “what breaks if input doubles?”

also saw some google interview questions software engineer style threads say “you can mess up one round and still pass.” not true in my case lol. recruiter just ghosted me after 5 days.

anyway. if you’re prepping do mock interviews. talk out loud. and maybe stop grinding 500 problems and start learning how to think.