Google Onsite Performance (SWE) vs Leveling L3/L4
Microsoft L61 SWE
TC 230k
YOE 1.75 at time of application, almost 2 now
Update 3: Declined offer before seeing it. L4 was not possible and per the recruiter compensation would be below expectations and require negotiation.
Update 2: Passed HC @ L3. Team matching now.
Update: Passed onsite (notified in 3 business days), onto HC and team match in parallel.
Just wanted to collect some thoughts and eventually add a data point for how well you have to do to get L4 during an L3 onsite loop (possible with excellent performance according to recruiter). Will comment with my result after the recruiter gets back.
Interviews
1. Behavioral. Was able to give concrete examples to most questions, highlighting my experience in leading designs, driving cross-team collaboration, and working independently.
2. Later found out the problem was NP-complete. During the interview, came up with brute force first. After struggling for a better solution interviewer told me to go with brute force. Finished it and the extension using brute force. At the end, the interviewer told me it was a hard problem and they purposefully restricted the input size to account for that.
3. A pretty practical problem. Got so far that the interviewer remarked multiple times that they had never gotten this far before.
4. Implement a special data structure. Solved a problem (twice) using it with iteration and recursion. Did pseudocode for an extension using recursion.
5. Leetcode-style problem boiling down to binary search. Due to the nature of the problem, running through test cases took a long time. Discussed an extension without implementation.
In all technical interviews, I was communicating constantly, was commended multiple times for asking good questions, and tried test cases.
What do you think?
#interview #google
comments
At that point I had offers from my top three choices so I was happy to end the shenanigans.