Google | Interview Experience | SE - Full Stack | Virtual Interview

Hello, I recently had the opportunity to interview virtually at Google, India for a Software Engineer - Full Stack Developer role. This position was for experienced professionals. The interviews were conducted over Google Meet, with each interview typically on a separate day, a schedule I discussed and arranged with my recruiter. The interview process comprised four rounds: three technical coding rounds, each approximately 45 minutes long, with no system design components, and one 45-minute behavioral round.

Round 1:
I was presented with a grid of dimensions n x m, composed of 0s and 1s, where 0 denotes a free cell and 1 a wall. The challenge was to determine if a robot, starting at (0,0), could reach the end cell (n-1, m-1) by breaking at most one wall in the grid.

Round 2:
This round focused on OS job scheduling, presenting a more open-ended discussion. I wasn't provided with a concrete input format, but the core task was to discuss how to return the sequence of execution and the starting time for each job, given their arrival and execution times, based on a First Come First Serve (FCFS) principle. The interviewer then posed a follow-up question: how would the algorithm change if each job had an associated priority?

Round 3:
I was given an n-ary tree and two specific edges, identified by the vertices connecting them (V1, V2) and (V3, V4). The problem asked to return the number of vertices (nodes) in each disconnected component if these two edges were removed from the tree. This task needed to be performed for Q queries, with the assumption that the tree was fully-connected before each query.

Round 4:
This round was entirely behavioral. The questions were primarily situation-based, often starting with 'tell me about a time...' and followed by probing questions.