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Google SDE 3 interview | phone screen experience | USA

Location
USA
Posted
14 Oct 2026
4 reads

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)

  1. 01

    Maximum Efficiency Path in Weighted Graph

    Data Structures & Algorithms

    Given a graph with n nodes 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).

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