Google SDE 3 interview | phone screen experience | USA
- Location
- USA
- Posted
- 14 Oct 2026
Summary
I had a phone screen with Google that included a behavioral round and a coding round on graph algorithms; I struggled with the BFS approach and ran out of time on the Dijkstra implementation.
How it went
There were 2 interviews. The first one was behavioral, where I was asked questions on my resume to describe how I build the services and what were the tradeoffs for them.
The second interview was a coding interview. Question : you are given a n nodes and edges which are transnmission lines which can have values from 0 to 1. Given a Source and destination return the path with maximum efficency. For this solution I immediately jumped to dijkstra's algorithm and explained how I would solve this. But the interviewer asked what about DFS and BFS? I told for DFS how I would solve it but the time complexity would be O(V!). Hence I didnt propose it. Then He asked me about BFS solution. I was trying to explain an answer for BFS but wasn't able to find a solution, explained a couple of approaches and he pointed out those wont work and later he told me that solution is not possible with BFS. So I started coding the dijkstra's solution and time ran out. I wasn't able to run through an example for the code. I just explained the time and space complexity for this solution. I also didnt ask for constraints and made any asumptions, like how many nodes or edges. Will there be a garantueed path always. I was not able to ask those questions and my interviewer pointed those things out.
Do you guys thing this is passing?
Questions asked (1)
- 01
Maximum Efficiency Path in Weighted Graph
Data Structures & Algorithms
Given a graph with
nnodes and edges representing transmission lines, each edge has a weight value of either 0 or 1. Provided a source node and a destination node, return the path that yields the maximum efficiency (i.e., the highest total weight or best reliability).