Google's 5 Months Preparation Comes to an END!

Hello everyone.

I am not able to clear the Google's interview despite of preparing for 5 months from Janurary 2025 to till date.

Its very hard to digest when you put your everything for this and still can't go through it.

Interview Experience:

Initial Recruiter Screening Round:

Recruiter has reached out to me in last week of Decemeber on Linkedin and initially I thought it is a fake because of domain (@xwf.google.com). But eventually I come to know its from Google only and had an initial screening round in the first week of January and asked one month for the preparation time.

Phone Screen Round:

My phone screen round was supposed to be happen in the last week of January but due to interviewer's unavailability my phone screen got rescheduled thrice !!

So it happened on 29th March.

Question:

• Main problem: There are two organisations (A and B), in org A, there are couple of servers connected by the cables through which data is being transferred and in org B there is a hacker who has hacked one of the server and that server got corrupted and From the corrupted node, the data transfer will not happen. Now your task is to find whether the data transfer will happen or not for given source and destination.

I was able to solve this problem in 10-15 mins using BFS. Push all the server in queue if they are not corrupted.

• Follow Up 1: Find the shortest distance for data transfer from source to destination

Approach: Initially I thought I need to use Dijkstra, and I started adding the edge weights to my graph, but interviewer interrupted me and said, consider they are unit weights.

Then I removed priority_queue and kept queue because it will work in O(1) operation which I mentioned while removing the pq. Interviewer was happy that even while writing the code, I was thinking about the complexities. Solution : Modified the previous solution and introduced distance array.

• Follow Up 2: Now the corrupted server has ability to corrupt its adjacent neighbor servers till "K" distance. Now you need to tell whether the data transfer will happen or not and also compute the shortest distance.

Approach: I implemented the multi source bfs and added all the corrupted servers into a set and while performing the BFS, Just check whether the server is present into that set or not, If its not present then we can push it into queue. Rest of the code still remains same.

Verdict:

Next day my recruiter called me and said "Your Feedback was very positive, will be moving your profile for onsites"

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Then I asked my new recruiter to give me 1.5 months to prepare for the onsites because this was the first time I was appearing for Google L3 position and I don't wanted to make any mistake. And he agreed on that.

Onsite 1:

Main Question:

(Interviewer was from US) https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6552833/google-l3-onsite-round-1-2025-india-by-a-ndlg/

This was the exact same problem he asked me. The problem statement was very vague. So I was very confused so I asked so many clarifying question and after that I realised its a "GRAPH PROBLEM". So I explained my approach to the interviewer and he said "Why to choose BFS or DFS" I explained why I am more inclined towards BFS. He agreed on that part and I coded the solution. And also explained correct time and space complexity and did dry run on two test cases.

He was impressed with the code quality and code-readability which he mentioned in the interview itself.

Follow Up:

Now find the number of stones you collected?

Approach: Just added a counter and incremented in each BFS interation.

Interview ended on a positive note

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Onsite 2:

Main Question:

(Interviewer was from Warsaw) You are given the value n, and there will be an row on a board numbered from 0 to n-1. Now you are standing on the 0th position and you have two coins. Now you flip the coins at every position and based on the outcome you need to move forwared. -> Head, Head : You can move by +2 position -> Head, Tail : Can move by +1 -> Tail, Head : Can move by +1 -> Tail, Tail : Can move by +1

Find out the number of ways you can reach the end position.

Approach: I quickly realized its a DP problem. You can say a jump game variation.

I explained my understanding about the problem to her and took some of the test cases for the output. I was thinking in Combinatorics direction. But she said think in the recursive way or generating a recurrence formula.

AND EVENTUALLY I LOST... She given me some of the hints and I quickly catched it and while this was happening already 40 mins were completed and when I looked at the clock I got panicked because I did not even started to code. I asked her "Can I write down the code?" She said : "Yes"

I started writing the code in rush and due to that I made major mistake. Even after computing the correct recurrence relation. I wrote some different recursive calls.

And at the end, Interviewer mentioned that I missed an edge case. I identified that and I added that

But I knew. I could have done it better but since I always scare about DP problems, maybe that could be the reason I did not performed well in this round.

I WAS SURE I WILL BE RECEIVING THE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK FOR THIS ROUND!

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Googlyness Round

(Interviewer was from Google London)

Standard questions were asked to me. For example:

• Tell me the time when you led a team and how you managed?
• Tell me if your teammates are not completing their tasks within time.
• How do you motivate your junior teammates if they are underperfoming
• What are the points if you want to build the product for any kind of genders(Male, Female, LGBTQ, Person with disability)

This was the question for which I could not able to answer it properly because I did not have any example or answer for this.

But from my side, I have given my best possible answers and interviewer was also seemed satisfied with my answers.

She asked me around 18-20 questions and I answered all of them. Interview was ended on a positive note. where I asked her regarding her work in Google.

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Next day after Googlyness, my last onsite about to happen but the my recruiter called me before 3 hours of my last round. He said he has reached out for the feedback. I got broke down. I knew he called me to give negative feedback because why would he will call me before my last round.

He has given the feedback:

• Onsite 1: Very Positive
• Onsite 2: Negative (which I knew it)
• Googlyness: NEGATIVE I was quite surpised with this Googlyness rating because I have given the best possible answers and I was assuming I would at least get SH/H in this round.

Due to 2/3 round's feedback is negative they will not moving ahead with my application.

I broke down into tears 😭. I never ever imagined I would be receiving the Negative in Googlyness. Recruiter said "I was not giving concrete examples in the Googlyness round"

He said Cooldown period is for 12 months. They will reach out to me for L4 role after cooldown. I don't know what to say now! But I am very shattered.