Google | L4 | Phone Screen | Horrible Experience
Summary
I experienced a challenging phone screen at Google India for an L4 role where the interviewer was uncooperative, providing minimal information for a difficult problem, which I eventually solved within the given time constraints.
Full Experience
Hey folks,
Today I appeared for phone screen round at Google India for L4 role.
Interviewer was not at all cooperative. He pasted the 2 lines of problem and thats it.
The problem statement was something like:
“Google has started it’s shuttle service, you have given shuttle departure time, capacity of shuttles ( fixed across all shuttles ) , and arrival time of the passengers. What’s the maximum late time you can arrive and still catch the shuttle.”
No testcase provided, upon asking the testcase he shared one testcase that has only input!
No output provided!! I asked for sample output, he said that you have to find out on your own ( Bruh I didn’t even understand the problem yet )
It took me 20-25 to understand the problem and figuring out the output of testcase 1 after some to and from.
Then in last 20 minutes, i was able to solve the problem.
He pointed out some edge case and I fixed it on the go within minute.
I took whole 45 minutes of the time to solve the problem, my recruiter from very start said try to solve the problem within 30 minutes and without any hints and all.
Found the same problem on leetcode after the round : https://leetcode.com/problems/the-latest-time-to-catch-a-bus/description/
~400 likes & ~800 dislikes !!! 28% Acceptance Rate, fellow leetcoders are cursing this problem in discuss & comments section.