How To Prepare For A Google Interview

Where To Go From Here

While there was quite a bit covered in this post, weve barely even scratched the surface.

Big O For Coding Interviews & Beyond is a simple and practical guide to algorithmic complexity. Learn what you need to know specifically to analyze any algorithm, and ace your next coding interview.

This course is designed for folks who arent math whizzes, or even super-experienced in programming. Written in a conversational style, chock full of real-world examples, this course is an antidote to the mountains of dry, technical Big-O references.

Schedule Video Calls With Friends

Consider scheduling video calls with friends to practice conversing online. Welcome feedback and suggestions from friends, and ask them how you and your background look on the camera. Also, ask your friends if they hear and see you well. Take note of how your internet connection is throughout the call, and consider if you need to move to a different location. For example, moving closer to your router tends to provide a better internet connection.

Who Do You Believe Are Googles Main Competitors How Does Google Stand Apart

With this question, the hiring manager can determine whether you have a solid idea of which other companies dominate spaces where Google also sits. This can be especially relevant in product-oriented roles, including everything from product manager positions to software developer jobs, where finding opportunities to outshine other companies comes with the territory.

EXAMPLE ANSWER:

Google has several main competitors, including Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Waze, and several others, depending on the specific space. One of the main differentiators is Googles ability to integrate its services, creating a cohesive cross-platform experience. Additionally, Google has such a wide range of offerings. It promotes a degree of familiarity you dont necessarily get with some of the competitors, making using the products and platforms feel like a natural part of daily life.

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How I Got Here

I started programming in middle school, but when it came time for college I pursued a degree in Economics. My rationale was that there would be too many programmers looking for jobs by the time I graduated. Boy, I was wrong.

Later, I joined the Army to become a programmer, but the recruiter talked me into a military intelligence position, and I spent the next two years studying the Korean language. I served in South Korea for 2 years afterward.

Before I left the Army, I attempted to get back into programming and was surprised at the difficulty. I had learned BASIC in middle school and kept programming it through high school. But I restarted my programming studies with C++, and the leap was too large. I just couldnt grasp it.

I did enjoy making websites, however, but I used software with a Word-like interface that I used to publish my websites. I didnt know how to make websites from scratch.

After the Army, I decided to stay in Korea for a year and teach English. I used my nights and weekends to study web programming, using Perl, HTML, CSS , JavaScript, and SQL.

After a year of intense study, I landed a job in the Seattle area, and Ive been here ever since.

Ive been a web developer now for 15 years. Ive started 3 companies, 2 of which are still running and generating revenue. Ive worked at large and small companies, helped startups launch and grow, and recruited and managed teams. Ive been a product manager, a CEO, a designer, and a marketer.

Ready To Nail Your Pm Interview

PM Exercises exists to give product managers all the tools they need to prepare for their interviews with an active community of over 30,000 members, over 1000 interview questions with online lessons, and group and private coaching. Ready to get started? Visit to sign up today!

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Understanding Google’s Product Management Hiring Criteria

First, let’s understand how Google defines the responsibilities of a product manager. Here are the 5 key responsibilities they list on their PM job listings:

Ultimately, Google assesses whether you’ll be able to perform the PM job by assessing you in five core categories: 1) product sense 2) technical chops 3) analytical chops 4) communication skills and 5) culture fit .

Speak Slowly And Concisely

Video calling can sometimes lag or slow down your speech slightly. To prepare for lag, speak slowly so your interviewer can understand you. Wait a few seconds before responding to any questions to make sure they are done speaking. Another way to avoid confusion is by keeping your responses concise. Many hiring managers also appreciate straightforward responses that directly answer their questions.

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Acing The Google Interview: The Ultimate Guide

Passing the Google Interview. Every engineers dream.

After all, why wouldnt you want to work at Google with the free food, cushy salary, and credentials that will make you set for life?

The Google Interview is a methodology of technical interviewing that has been widely used and popularized by the tech giant, . It serves as the ultimate test to determine whether you have the coding and algorithmic chops to develop software with the best.

It is a crucial measuring stick by which your technical prowess is assessed and arguably the most important determining factor in Googles decision to go hire or no hire.

If you want to stack the deck in your favor when interviewing at Google you need to develop a strategy for attacking the most critical parts of what you will encounter. In this post, Ill show you how.

As the style of interview that Google uses has been so widely emulated, this post will also help you interview at most other large tech companies. So sit back and lets dig in.

Learn About Google’s Culture

Most candidates fail to do this. But before investing tens of hours preparing for an interview at Google, you should take some time to make sure it’s actually the right company for you.

Google is prestigious and it’s therefore tempting to assume that you should apply, without considering things more carefully. But, it’s important to remember that the prestige of a job won’t make you happy in your day-to-day work. It’s the type of work and the people you work with that will.

If you know engineers who work at Google or used to work there it’s a good idea to talk to them to understand what the culture is like. In addition, we would recommend reading the following resources:

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How To Find The Time Complexity Of An Algorithm

There are three steps youll want to take when calculating the time complexity of an algorithm:

• List down all the basic operations in the code
• Count the number of times each gets executed
• Sum all the counts to get an equation

Heres a simple example that measures the time complexity of a for loop of size n:

#include < iostream> using namespace std int main

First, split the code into individual operations and then compute how many times it is being executed, which will look like this:

1 + 1 + 1 + + n + n + 1 = 3 + + 2n + 1 => 3n + 5 1+1+1++n+n+1=3++2n+1=> 3n+5

General tips for asymptotic analysis:

• Every time a list or array gets iterated over c x length times, it is most likely in O time.
• When you see a problem where the number of elements in the problem space gets halved each time, it will most probably be in O runtime.
• Whenever you have a singly nested loop, the problem is most likely in quadratic time.

Useful Formulae for calculating time complexity of an algorithm:

Make A List Of Keywords

As you read their content , make a list of keywords and phrases. For Google, I recommend starting with their Career Page.

They are very transparent about their hiring process and provide a great outline of what steps you need to follow, from self-reflection to how to structure your resume.

Help them see your value by being clear and concise about how your experience and values are a good fit for the position and the company.

As Google says on their Career Page,

Draw a direct line between your passion and our position, let us see who you are a bit.

Here are some words and phrases that I think are the most relevant based on Googles content on their Career Page:

• organization

• variety of backgrounds

• rewarding

Highlight the keywords that you feel you can genuinely and naturally incorporate into your interview responses, and keep that list near you when youre preparing your answers.

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Top 30 Google Interview Questions

Every year, Google receives about 3 million applications. Thats only a little less than the entire population of Silicon Valley, which comes in just above 3.1 million.

Holy cow, right?

You know what makes that statistic even more intimidating only about 0.2 percent of those applicants are hired. Now, that doesnt mean you should panic. After all, 0.2 percent of 3 million is 6,000 people. Thats a ton of hiring. Plus, not every applicant is actually qualified. If you are, your odds are probably much better than that statistic shows.

Beating the odds isnt something youll do by accident. You have to be ready to nail any interview question they throw at you. If you fail to impress, youll probably get passed by.

But youre here, right? So, that means you dont want to be complacent. Youre looking for an edge, and thats a great thing. Without any further ado, come with us as we explore what it takes to stand out during your Google interview.

Practice Like You Play

Effective practice is realistic practice.

In the midst of an interview, you want to be focused and able to spend the majority of your mental energy on the problem given from the interviewer. You dont want to be thrown off by extraneous factors such as not being used to writing code in a non-IDE environment.

Here is a list of factors that you should be mindful of when developing your practice regimen.

Time Constraints

The phone interview is 30-45 minutes, and each of the one-on-one onsite interviews will be roughly 45 minutes to an hour each. In each of these scenarios, you will be presented with at least one question, which, in most cases, is a coding category question.

In order to effectively practice under time constraints, one strategy would be to select one specific problem.

For instance, selecting a problem from one of the book or video resources under the Additional Resources section of this post would be a good place to start. Then, start a timer and attempt to solve the problem without access to an IDE.

Following this practice for a few different categories of questions will give you some signal with respect to how you are faring with time constraints. Getting optimal solutions within the time interval of 30-45 minutes consistently for problems of varying difficulty is the ultimate goal. If you are struggling to hit this goal, use this as an opportunity to tighten up this area is something you will need to work on.

Whiteboarding

Pressure Constraints

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Got A Google Interview

“Rocketblocks was essential in my PM internship prep. Overall, RocketBlocks allowed me to develop crucial PM interviewing skills without which I could not have landed multiple internship offers.” — Anurag Ojha, incoming Google PM, Darden MBA

Regardless of the method, don’t go into the interview cold turkey. To kick start your prep, here are a handful of sample questions.

Product sense question examples

• What are three key ways you could improve Gmail?
• What’s the biggest pain you have with Google Docs? How would you fix it?
• How would you design a new Google to-do list app?

Technical question examples

• Explain how the internet works: what happens when you type a URL into your browser?
• Imagine you’re a PM on Gmail and you decide to launch a new “schedule an email” for sending feature. What parts of the Gmail tech stack would this feature require you to touch?
• How would you explain what an API is to someone who is completely non-technical

Analytics question examples

• Estimate how many Gmail messages are sent per day.
• If Google Play store downloads were down 4.5% WoW, how would you investigate that dip?
• How would you determine if a new Google Search feature launch was successful?

Communication question examples

Familiarize Yourself With The Job Description

Just like any interview, the hiring manager asks about the job they posted and what you know about it. Review the job description so that you fully understand the role and its responsibilities. You can also have the job description ready to look at on your computer, but make sure it doesn’t distract you. Familiarizing yourself with the job provides you clarity on what the interview is for and what the company needs in a candidate. The more acquainted you are with the job description, the more prepared you appear to the interviewer.

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Practice Speaking Into A Camera

Speaking into a camera instead of directly to a person might seem unusual. It is common to find yourself talking to the screen where you see your interviewer instead of the camera. Instead, practice looking directly into your camera and holding your line of vision for an extended period. Otherwise, the interviewer sees your eyes looking downward into your screen instead. When you look directly into the camera, you look confident and engaged during the interview.

How To Prepare For A Google Interview: A Pm Exercises Community Success Story

Cracking a PM interview is possible but requires work: Google is no exception. In the second installment of our community success story series, we interviewed Sanchit Gupta, a PM Exercise Community member to learn about how they aced the interview at Google and got their dream PM job.

Read on to learn more!

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Getting Noticed By Google

Google receives more than two million resumes but hires only around 4000 employees every year so its not easy to get noticed by recruiters for interview calls. Take the referrals through some connections working in these companies or you can take the help of LinkedIn and online coding platforms to increase your chances for interview calls. Below are some points that will help you in getting the call for interviews

What Is Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is a platform created by Google for video calling. It is a common option for employers who prefer to meet with their job candidates virtually first. There are many benefits to Google Hangouts, such as the ability to have multiple users on one call, the ease of joining a meeting and the ability to interview from home. This is especially beneficial for candidates who live far away from the company and plan to relocate or for companies seeking remote employees.

Related:

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Prepare Answers To Some Common Questions:

Furnishing yourself with answers to the questions that they regularly ask is always a good idea. Do not assume that just because you are familiar with the principle things, you will be able to get through the interview successfully.

Often though we are familiar with answers, we find it tough to coherently get our words and thoughts across and end up using extremely unprofessional statements like you know what I mean or you get the point. The interview questions might cover anything that is on your CV. Thorough knowledge on the fundamentals of Computer Science is a must for any engineering job that you might apply for at Google.

The questions will test your knowledge on topics like-logical problems, hash tables, stacks, system design and arrays. If you answer the questions well and confidently then you have nothing to worry about.

Details On Hiring Criteria Interview Questions Company Culture And A Mock Interview Video With An Ex

Hiring criteria | Video mock interview | Sample interview questions | Business and culture

Google product managers have a great job. Full stop.

An opportunity to launch products for billons of users, great compensation and perks and wide latitude to execute on the most important features to drive their products forward are all part of the gig. As a result, landing a Google PM role is extremely tough – but worth it.

In this deep dive, we’ll present a high level plan for preparing for your Google PM interviews:

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