Sunday, March 24, 2024

How To Crack Interview At Google

Don't Miss

Fundamentals Of An Em Interview

Top Google Interview Questions And Answers | How to Crack An Interview At Google | Simplilearn

Engineering Managers in most tech companies are expected to play this intersectional role between People, Tech, and Product/Business. They are entrepreneurs for their own little startups and are held accountable for its success. The real question every company wants to answer is Can this person drive sustainable, long-term success for this area of the business? So they model the interview process to capture signals that can give them reasonable confidence about the candidates ability to drive that sustainable, long-term success. Obviously, it is impossible to categorically determine that, so companies resort to reasonable proxies. The proxies that Ive seen end up falling into these categories:

  • Technical Domain Experience

Lets look at each of these in detail and see how they manifest in various interview formats across different companies:

Recommended Reading: Where To Watch Harry And Meghan Interview

Process Of The Interview

The process of the interview at Google is almost similar to any other big company. At first, you have to clear the telephonic or calling round after that you will be forwarded for the company interview.

So, there are three screening rounds or calling phases

Screening round 1: A general introduction round by HR for checking your basic skills.

Screening round 2: This is the technical round that lasts for up to 45 minutes. It mostly held via call or video call.

Screening round 3: This one is also similar to the second round just with different persona and questions.

If you clear all these three rounds then you will be called for the on-site interview. There you have to face four rounds.

Round 1: It is a technical round to check your theoretical skills. It will last for around 45 minutes to an hour.

Round 2: This one is also similar to the first round. The test can be in written or verbal.

Round 3: It is slightly difficult from the above two rounds and ends up differently. This is also around to test your technical and analytical skills.

Round 4: This will be a personal interview round, here also your communication skills and technical skills are analyzed.

Pass The Phone Screenings

In the phone screening rounds, a recruiter will contact you to explain a bit about the interview process and the role youre applying to. The interview lasts 30 to 60 minutes depending on the role.

  • For Technical roles, such as software engineering, if the first phone screening goes well, you should expect additional rounds. These aretechnical phone screening that involves phone coding challenges to test basic problem-solving and data structuring skills, such as DOM manipulation, or CSS. If your technical phone interview goes well you may be asked to complete a take home coding project.
  • For non-technical roles, expect behavioral, hypothetical, and case-based questions related to the role. For example, if youre a product manager candidate, you might be asked How would you improve Google Maps, or If you could implement a new feature for Gmail, what would it be?.

Also Check: What Should Females Wear To A Job Interview

The Inability Of Businesses To Handle Data

Businesses gather data on a daily basis for online operations and transactions. Many businesses have the fundamental problem of analysing and categorising the data they collect and store. In a circumstance like this, a data scientist becomes the saviour. Businesses can make remarkable progress if data is maintained appropriately and efficiently, leading to increased production.

Here Are Some Preparation Resources Which You Could Use:

Top 29 Google Interview Questions to Crack the Coding Interview ...
  • Coursera Algorithm Specialization : This is a really good summary to refresh your skills on common algorithms and data structures concepts. I recommend you to audit these courses before you start practicing.
  • Cracking the Coding Interview: this is a really popular reference when talking about coding interviews. For a good reason, this book is a go to book everytime you want to refresh your knowledge and skills. It is concise but still clear enough to describe typical coding interview questions and theories.
  • Github SWE Interview Prep: This is a nice repository to refresh yourself of basic to advanced algorithms. The author did a superb job to explain tough problems and list the important concepts in the coding interview .

Also Check: Questions To Ask Cfo In Interview

Experience And Skill Levels

Hiring managers evaluate how relevant your skills and work experience are to the role youâre interviewing for.

Key areas of evaluation are:

  • Your problem-solving abilities
  • Your ability to apply programming concepts to different problems
  • Your ability to find multiple solutions to a problem and identify the most optimal one

Read Also: What Are Some Good Interview Questions To Ask A Candidate

Automated Interviewing With Coding Challenges

Unlike the , where the initial assessment is a phone screen, Amazon expands this assessment to sometimes include a coding challenge.

Some interviewers prefer this method, as the performance anxiety of interacting with another person is absent, and the only requirement on your end is to write code that executes correctly and efficiently.

This is also positive for Amazon, as they do not need to expend resources on conducting 30-45 minute interviews with candidates. Furthermore, they can also expand their reach substantially, as this process is somewhat automated.

Oftentimes, these coding challenges are driven through an engine similar to that of HackerRank, where your code is automatically analyzed for syntactic correctness, efficiency, and correctness for the task at hand. This gives a better signal to the interviewee about how well they are performing during the interview itself.

While all of these coding assessments will have instructions, they will often mimic those of HackerRank insofar as actually using the same submission and judging criteria.

Therefore, it is most likely a good idea to play around with the HackerRank interface, practicing a few problems to ensure that you do not get tripped up on the interface itself. This way, you can then just focus on solving the problem.

Read Also: Interview Attire Women

How To Prepare And Test If Your Preparation Is Good Enough:

  • If its a DS/ Algo based coding round, you can prepare for it while you prepare for your DS/ Algo round. If you are hitting the targets for your DS/ Algo round , you are well prepared for it. Usual pitfalls are that people miss out on the edge cases, so make sure you handle those.
  • If its a functional coding interview, then the best way to prepare is to practise some sample problems and get the code reviewed by your peers. You should also try running some static code analysers on your code to check your code quality. Alternatively, you could do an LLD mock interview which should give you a good insight into your code quality.
  • This worked for me and helped me to get offers from almost all the companies that I applied for. I hope it works for you too!

    How To Prepare For Google Software Engineer Interview

    Prepare for Your Google Interview: Troubleshooting and Scripting

    Knowing what concepts to cover and dedicated practice are key to preparing for Googleâs software engineering interview. Hereâs what you must cover:

    • Be familiar with at least one programming language and object-oriented programming concepts.
    • Understand how different algorithms work and their complexities.
    • Solve popular problems on hashmap, stack, queues, linked list, etc.
    • Learn simple and discrete math problems like probability and statistics.
    • Understand the concurrency, processes, and threads related to operating systems.
    • System design questions that help you to showcase your problem-solving skills in real-world problems

    Head over to the Learn and Problem pages to brush up on your basics and practice popular coding problems.

    Also Check: Interview Attire Womens

    Do Not Believe Everything You Hear From People:

    There are numerous people out there who are always willing to give you advice, whether or not you ask for it. Do not believe everything you hear. Sometimes people will tell you to prepare answers to the questions like

    Where do you see yourself in twenty years

    Why do you want to be a part of the Google family?

    Dont bother yourself thinking about answers to questions like these.

    The interviewer will be an experienced professional who will not waste time discussing things like this. So listen to the advice people are willing to give you but dont believe every word of it as if it were Gospel truth. Though their may be some open ended questions like what are some of your ideas for improving an existing Google product or What were some of the biggest technical challenges that you faced in your previous work place.

    How Much Time Do You Need To Prepare

    When we surveyed a group of software engineers on how much time they thought youâd need to prepare for a technical interview at Google , the answers ranged from 2 weeks to a year, with 6 months being the most popular response.

    Ava says that her answer to this question assumes you have a foundation in Computer Science knowledge â either through a university degree, online courses or some form of self-study. Without such a foundation, youâd really struggle and the time spent on prep work would be really unproductive and demotivating.

    If you can dedicate yourself to full-time preparation and working through sample problems like itâs your job, Ava says 2-3 months should suffice. If however, youâre only able to work part-time on your coding prep, which let’s be real here, is most people, then you should aim for 1 year.

    Itâs important to be realistic about the time and effort that you need to invest in preparation and upskilling in order to land these kinds of roles. When a group of fresh hires at Google were asked how many practice questions they solved in preparation for their SWE interview the answer was 200-300.

    You May Like: Questions To Ask A Cfo During An Interview

    What Is The Expectation:

  • You should be able to solve the problem given to you as efficiently as possible.
  • You should use the Data Structure that is most optimal for solving the given problem.
  • You should be able to code it up and the code needs to work, in one attempt if possible.
  • All of this under 40 minutes. The lesser the better.
  • Land Your Dream Job As A Software Engineer At Google

    How I cracked Job Interviews for Google, Facebook and UBER

    Interview Kickstart can help you with your tech interview prep! With IK, you get the unique opportunity to learn from and engage with FAANG tech leads and hiring managers. Head over to for a complete guide on cracking the Google Interview.Want to know more? Sign up for our FREE webinar.

    Want to nail your next tech interview? Sign up for our FREE Webinar.

    Recommended Reading: Women’s Outfit For Job Interview

    List Of Practice Questions

    Now that youve got a framework in mind, use it to practice some real interview questions that were asked in past interviews at big tech companies. Here is a list of prioritization questions from PM interviews at , , , and Lyft, according to data from Glassdoor.com and Blind.

    Example prioritization interview questions

    • Imagine youre a PM at a startup that works with big data from the NHL whats the first product you would ship?
    • How do you build a roadmap?
    • How do you prioritize what to build?
    • If you have projects A, B, C, how do you prioritize them?
    • How do you prioritize in your current role?
    • You are the PM for Facebook live what features would you prioritize?
    • You are the PM for Facebook pages what features would you prioritize?
    • You are the PM for Facebook posts what reactions should we add next?

    Is Facebook Or Google Interview Harder

    When asked to rate their overall experience interviewing at their current company, employees gave Apple and Microsoft the highest ratings. Facebook received the lowest ratings. Employees at Google were most likely to rate the interview process as difficult or very difficult . Microsoft was close behind at 47%.

    Recommended Reading: System Design Interview Prep

    Things You Should Know About The Interview Process

    Googles hiring process is highly decentralized. A former hiring manager at Google said that there is no strict guidance on how to get hired. But still these tips will indicate you the right path to success. Google interview process is unique. It can take several weeks and you have to be patient. There are two types of interviews at Google.

    How To Test If Your Preparation Is Good Enough:

    Prepare for Your Google Interview: Coding

    Leetcode is one platform that can give you a good insight into your preparation level. Try to achieve the below targets for at least 80% of the problems that you attempt:

    • For Medium level problems, try to solve them within 20 minutes and in two attempts.
    • For Hard level problems, try to solve them within 35 minutes and at max in three attempts.

    If you are not achieving both of these for most of the problems, youll need a bit more practice. And if you are solving most of the problems in this 20/35 mins time frame, you are very likely to clear any company that you appear for, from the DS/ Algo standpoint.

    Recommended Reading: Questions To Ask A Cfo

    Prescreen With Google Employee

    Your phone screen will last between 45 – 60 minutes, likely on Google Hangouts. The Google employee will test you with coding questions related to data structures and algorithms. You will solve these on a Google Doc, using around 20-30 lines of code.

    It is important to communicate your thought process as you work this is how they gauge your general cognitive ability.

    You can expect an open-ended coding challenge. Asking further questions for clarification is a great way to demonstrate problem-solving skills. If you finish before the time ends, look for ways to optimize and check for bugs. Always be sure to consider corner and edge cases.

    For tips on phone interviews, check out this guide to phone interviews for software developers.

    How To Crack The Technical Interview

    Now that you know what the rounds are in these technical interviews and what resources you can use to prepare for these interviews, you can get yourself ready for the interviews. It is up to you to use these resources to prepare. Some people might take days to prepare for the interview, while some might take months.

    But what should we do during the interview to make sure we clear the interview? Here are some of the things you need to keep in mind for these technical interviews:

    You May Like: Best Interview Attire For A Woman

    Picking A Programming Language

    Before anything else, you need to pick a programming language for your algorithmic coding interview. Most companies will allow you to code in the language of your choice. The only exception I know is Google. They allow their candidates to pick from only Java, C++, Python, Go or JavaScript. For the most part, I recommend using a language that you are extremely familiar with, rather than one that is new to you but that the company uses widely.

    There are some languages that are more suitable than others for coding interviews. Then there are some that you absolutely want to avoid. From my experience as an interviewer, most candidates pick Python or Java. Other languages commonly selected include JavaScript, Ruby, and C++. I would absolutely avoid lower-level languages like C or Go, simply because they lack standard library functions and data structures.

    Personally, Python is my de facto choice for coding algorithms during interviews. It is succinct and has a huge library of functions and data structures. One of the top reasons I recommend Python is that it uses consistent APIs that operate on different data structures, such as len, for … in … and slicing notation on sequences . Getting the last element in a sequence is arr , and reversing it is simply arr. You can achieve a lot with minimal syntax in Python.

    How To Crack Technical Interview Google Amazon & More

    How to crack Google interview by Jay Bansal

    Hello guys! If you are here, you are probably thinking about changing jobs. Or already giving interviews. You might have an offer in hand and want to try your luck with the big companies. Its very tough to clear technical interview rounds at FAANG level companies and rightly so. If it was easy, everybody would be working at these companies.

    This article will guide you through the technical interview process at software companies like Google, Amazon, etc. This post is not just limited to cracking interviews at just Google, Amazon, or any specific company. It is applicable for most product companies as the interview process is almost the same.

    We will also go through the dos and donts in these technical interview rounds. These points will be very important in a software interview.

    For each and every interview round, we have compiled a list of important questions. These interview questions have been asked in technical interview rounds at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Flipkart, and others. Also mentioned in the brackets are the names of the companies the respective question was asked in.

    Lets go through the technical interview rounds at these companies and what all do you need to prepare to clear these rounds of interviews.

    Recommended Reading: Questions To Ask Cfo During Interview

    Simple Tips On How To Crack An Interview For Your Dream Job

    1. Make a research about the company: Before attending interview research about the companys background and the job role for which you are being interviewed. By doing the research you will get the knowledge to answer questions like: Tell about our company? who are our competitors? What are our products? etc.

    2. Reach early to the location: Punctuality is very important for the interview. Being timely are a few things you must to practice in the standard of living because it can help you always. Reach ten to fifteen minutes early so that you can relax and ready to give the interview.

    3. Dress formally and with neat hairstyle: Neatly comb your hair. Men must always shave before participating in an interview. Use a soft perfume or deodorant. Men should be dressed in smart formal clothes such as well ironed trousers and shirt with a tie or formal suit and wear a formal belt and formal watch. Combination of white shirt and black pant work well, make sure your shoes are polished.

    Women, on the other hand, it is not essential to wear western clothes. Women must be dressed in non-fussy and dignified clothes such as salwar kameez, sari or trousers/skirt suit.

    9. Finish the interview on a positive end: Say Thank you to him/her for giving such a valuable time. Ask them if you want to know any further information about the work, culture and etc in their company. Ask for the feedback it gives a positive impression on you but does not overdo it.

    More articles

    Popular Articles