Google telephonic interview
I recently had a telephonic interview for a swe position. I was asked a simple question to to play with string lists. After I successfully gave the answer, the usual follow on question was to talk about scaling the solution design when input is humongous. I had an answer for that as well. Basically, I thought I had nailed it. After a couple days, I learnt they were not proceeding with On-site. I was really surprised and didn't get any feedback too. Now you can be judgemental and comment that I may be lacking this and that but please try to helpful and it'll be great if you can provide some insight with what could go wrong even when your solution is correct, you talk with a good listener attitude, you ask clarification questions and you behave as well as any candidate would. I did get onsite opportunities with apple, VMware and Microsoft and got all the three offers. But Google just doesn't want me to even visit them. Also, when can i apply again? P.s Any pro-tips are welcome.
Clearly they are expecting you to code optimal solution
Basically what i provided was a O(n) solution where you pretty much have to take all the data in consideration at least once. That's what i did. I did talk about n^2 solution and nlgn and then came to n solution.
It seems like you got the optimal solution. Usually O(log n) or O(n) solution is expected
they failed you because you call it "telephonic"
This guy must be Indian. Indians call it telephonic and refuse to be corrected.
I'm an indian as you spotted. Lesson learnt! But i hope this was not the reason 😅 Even my interviewer was indian. Btw, what's the freeze period?
6 months I think
Humongous input - does it mean that it does not fit into memory? Did you take it into consideration? Mapreduce?
Exactly, i started with generators and yeilding pertinent values. Later discussed about map reduce to distribute the load.
Just saying, it's not always your fault. There are bad interviewers as well. They look for a specific answer and don't like it when you think things through and arrive at a slightly different algorithm. I know interviewers like this. I know that there are guidelines about what to accept and not to get tunnel vision in your own solution etc, but at the end of the day interviewers are human as well and I think that they do make bad calls sometimes.
Probably cuz they're super selective and false positives can be precarious. Got your point! Thanks
Google is very selective. Almost all Candidates are well prepared and competition is tough.
OP - I assume you first spoke to recruiter on first call and then this technical call. Is that right?
Sometimes you just get a bad interviewer . Other than that, may be you didn’t come up with a solution as fast as the interviewer was expecting or may be they wanted to ask another question but ran out of time. Or they felt answer is text bookish or memorized.
I know even when you have a solution but if it’s not the optimal solution, then they will fail you. You have to give the optimal solution every time