Google L4 Chances

Hi all,

I had my Google preliminary rounds today and feeling a bit uneasy about how it went.

DSA Round:

I was given a question similar to “Count Visible People” but with a twist in visibility rules.

In this version, if the observer is taller, shorter people in between don’t block the view.

Example:
Array: 1, 10, 6, 7, 9, 2, 4, 5
For 5, visible people are: 4, 2, 9, 10
(In the usual LeetCode version, 2 wouldn’t be visible, but here it is.)

For the initial part, I was able to write an optimal O(n) solution.
Then the interviewer asked a follow‑up to compute it for the entire array.
I gave a brute force solution (O(n²)) verbally.
When asked to optimize, I tried a few approaches but couldn’t reach a correct solution in time.
Toward the end, I wrote a monotonic stack based pseudocode, but later realized it was incorrect.

After the interview, I tried to upsolve it. One alternative I found was using a segment tree, but that would be around O(n² log n), which is actually worse than my brute force. So now I feel my initial verbal solution might have been the best possible here.

Honestly, this round didn’t feel that strong. I feel interviewer wasn’t very impressed.

Googlyness Round: This went really well. The discussion felt natural, and I was able to answer everything confidently. This is the only part I feel good about.

For Google, is it still possible to move to next (on‑site) rounds with one average DSA round but strong googlyness round?
How long does Google usually take to get back after prelim rounds?

Right now it just feels like I missed it by a small margin, which is kind of hard to shake off.

Would really appreciate honest insights from people who’ve gone through loop.