Google New Grad Interview Experience 2025 - India
Summary
I completed six technical interview rounds for a New Grad position at Google India, performing well on most questions but still awaiting a final decision due to staggered hiring for the 2025 batch.
Full Experience
Google Interview Questions:
Recruiter’s Email: October 19, 2024
- Interview 1 (November 6, 2024):
Obtain the inorder predecessor and successor in a binary search tree. Follow up: without using extra memory
Self-evaluation: Hire
Took some time to modify the binary tree for parent pointers, hence not a strong hire, but did successfully code both question and follow-up within 35 minutes.
- Interview 2 (November 29, 2024, interviewer didn’t show up, rescheduled to December 6, 2024):
Given an array, return the largest subarray that is a special arithmetic sequence.
Self-evaluation: Hire
Managed to code the solution using a two-pointer approach in around 45 minutes.
- Interview 3 (January 15, 2025):
A graph-based question. Alice and Bob are two friends in two cities. They want to go to a destination city, and they are open to cab sharing after meeting in a common city. Return the minimum cost of their travel.
Self-evaluation: Strong Hire
Used multi-source BFS with hashmaps for optimisation. Interviewer was positive and impressed. G&L round here also went very well, it was a light-hearted and fun discussion.
- Interview 4 (January 15, 2025):
We have been given a file with IP Addresses and their respective locations. We have also been given a query IP address, for which we need to obtain the location. Return the city to which the IP belongs. Follow up: instead of a single query, there are multiple queries in an array.
Self-evaluation: Lean No Hire
Took a bad turn into tries when followed up with multiple queries. Did code the optimal binary search approach, but was a little tensed, hence made small mistakes that I corrected under the time limit without any hints from the interviewer. The interviewer was a bit non-communicative, so the G&L round felt like a quiz with pre-meditated questions.
Additional rounds:
- Interview 5 (February 19, 2025):
We have been given a file that has chat logs between people. We need to obtain the top n talkative users, where the most talkative user is the user with the highest count of words. Follow up was given by amending the file structure.
Self-evaluation: Strong Hire
Coded the entire solution using heap within 30 minutes. Initial code was dynamic in nature so the follow-up was already addressed in my solution. Interviewer was impressed, hence had an informal and friendly discussion for the remaining 15 minutes.
- Interview 6 (February 19, 2025):
We have been given two arrays of two classes - Apartments (flat_number, no_of_bedrooms) and People(name, preference). There are people who prefer a single bedroom apartment (preference = False), and there are people who prefer having housemates : multiple bedroom apartments (preference = True). We need to prioritise preference of the people, but ensure that as many people are housed as possible.
Self-evaluation: Strong Hire
Coded the initial solution in 35 minutes using heaps, interviewer was impressed with the code quality and clarity. Told me to expect a positive response from the recruiter soon.
Situation today: They have told me to wait for a decision. The overall interview feedback is good, but apparently the hiring decisions for the 2025 batch are currently staggerred so it might take them till mid-June to deliver a concrete response.
Interview Questions (6)
Obtain the inorder predecessor and successor in a binary search tree. Follow up: without using extra memory
Given an array, return the largest subarray that is a special arithmetic sequence.
A graph-based question. Alice and Bob are two friends in two cities. They want to go to a destination city, and they are open to cab sharing after meeting in a common city. Return the minimum cost of their travel.
We have been given a file with IP Addresses and their respective locations. We have also been given a query IP address, for which we need to obtain the location. Return the city to which the IP belongs. Follow up: instead of a single query, there are multiple queries in an array.
We have been given a file that has chat logs between people. We need to obtain the top n talkative users, where the most talkative user is the user with the highest count of words. Follow up was given by amending the file structure.
We have been given two arrays of two classes - Apartments (flat_number, no_of_bedrooms) and People(name, preference). There are people who prefer a single bedroom apartment (preference = False), and there are people who prefer having housemates : multiple bedroom apartments (preference = True). We need to prioritise preference of the people, but ensure that as many people are housed as possible.