Google India | L3 | Reject

Hi community, wanted to share happy news that I got offer but God has other plans! Currently at well known product based company with 1.8 yrs of experience

Timelines: TPS : 6th Mar, 2025 - strong positive 1st Onsite : 21st Mar - strong positive 2nd Onsite : 24th Mar - mixed review but not negative Gnl : 25th Mar - positive 3rd Onsite : 26th Mar - positive

I had awesome recruiters who were literally the best and pouring positivity throughout the process, i got to know that i cleared interviews on 27th mar with positive feedback and i got team matched the very next day, one week of waiting and today I recieved rejection from HC, I took some hints in second onsite which was mentioned in the feedback, my recruiters were very positive that I will receive offer but not this time and since I got rejected at HC cooldown will be 18months, I have did cp in the past and I currently do problems randomly, literally in tears now but will bounce back!

Questions :

TPS : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/4929501/google-onsite-interview-by-anonymous_use-srpw/ -> I had this in the reverse way, follow up first and then kadanes - solved it easily.

Onsite 1 : variation of this question : https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/1376156/google-onsite-4th-round-by-anonymous_use-p8f9/ - solved it optimally without hints

Onsite 2 : it was fairly simple question - he asked me to find subset sum less than equal to k, I wondered if there is some twist, gave him nlogn, nlogm where m is number of elements in heap approach, he wanted it still better, he told me to think of algorithm which performs good in average case, then reframed question as find k minimum elements, then figured out it was quickselect algorithm, coded it properly but took some time for design because we need to take care of left and right sums, received mixed feedback as I took hints

Onsite 3: infix notation conversion - solved it easily, followup was to minimise brackets, took some time figured out and then told approach we ran out of time before implementation but got good positive feedback

Gnl: standard questions, interviewer was very chill

all my rounds were taken by european interviewers and I felt i recieved easy questions but HC told I took hints which is not good it seems, only in round 2 I took hints and that costed me. I found LC community to be very helpful, wanted to give back, they asked me tentative joining date and every other thing, I literally thought I made it because I have never seen google process so fast for a candidate, so fast for rejection! I thought atleast, I will have another round but really not sure why straight rejection considering I solved all problems in all rounds and hiring manager really wanted to have me in their team, the bar is quite very high!