I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google in Mar 2015
Interview
This a phone interview. Firstly, I was told to briefly talking about my working experience before my master degree and my course project, then he ask some fundamental questions about binary search tree and hash table, and compare their usage in different conditions. Then he ask two coding problems.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a function to determain if a string is Palindrome?
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.
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