Google europe L3 [Rejected] my experience and feelings
Summary
I completed the L3 interview loop at Google, passed the phone screen but was rejected after the onsite rounds.
Full Experience
I recently completed my L3 loop for Google. I may sound cliche but working in Google was my dream when I started leetcode 6 months ago so you can imagine how I felt when I received the call from the recruiter at the start of January that I was selected for interviews.
I did my phone screen and googlyness at the start of February and (quoting the recruiter) I got "the maximum score possible, excellent feedback".
I can't find the exact question online but was like "you get an array, find if the array can be divided in two equals part" and followup "what if you can change at most k numbers"
Then the onsite arrived. The first one went SO bad, I got a rude indian interviewer that asked a medium-hard problem (similar to this) that required a math intuition, I didn't get it so I struggled and panicked with a brute force for 40 minutes with him doing sarcastic remarks. As expected I was rated 0/4 on this round.
The second onsite I thought it went great, immediately recognized the optimal solution and code it up (and she agreed that my code would work) it was a string matching problem that required two queue. But then the recruiter told me I got a score of just 2/4 and I was penalized on code understanding because I slightly misjudged the time complexity and on debugging because I didn't do a dry run (but the recruiter never asked, all the other explicitly asked me to do a dry run, and again: she agreed the code was correct).
So I can't help but feel like I let myself down and I wasted my great chance to leave the job I hate, improve my life and move geographically to a better place.
Even the recruiter when she called with the feedback she said "I'm not sure what happened during the onsite, you had such good feedback on the phone screen" which didn't helped me even though she meant well.
I guess I should be prouder of completing the loop and getting a great feedback on the phone screen but right now I can see only the failures, especially after 6 months of grind on LC and the 12 months cooldown is brutal.
Also, is doing a dry run a musto do? even if not asked?
Interview Questions (1)
Array Partition with at most k changes
Given an integer array, determine if it can be split into two parts with equal sum. Follow‑up: allow changing at most k elements to achieve such a split.