Google L4 SWE - Chances of passing HC from non SWE Background
I finished my onsites with Google last week for L4 SWE. Previously I worked ~10 years as a Petroleum Engineer, then most recently ~3 years as a Data Scientist. I have a Masters in Computational Analytics from a top 10 school in the US. I have been published since I've been working as a DS and I was a presenter at Nvidia's GTC conference this year for some Deep Learning work I've been doing in partnership with Nvidia and using DGX Clusters. I had 4 rounds of technical and 1 behavioral. All 4 rounds were about mediums on LC (DP/Backtracking, DFS, API Design, Sliding Window). I got to the optimal solution for all of them almost immediately as I did like 8 months of LC prior to the interview (was also prepping for a FB interview at the same time so I went a little overboard). I did drop the ball on articulating the time and space complexity on like 2 of the 4. My brain was just so excited and exhausted from actually getting to the optimal, it shut down on me on those parts. I'm new to Blind and I've been reading posts from people who have said they have had the same experience as I did, but still ended up rejected by HC. They also had more YOE than me, and their entire background was SWE. This made me super nervous now, since I don't have an official SWE title (although I do a lot of it as a part of my DS role). My recruiter is even throwing some mixed signals at me, as their last correspondence was "I have been surprised by HC before, but initial feedback is that you crushed it". That first part of the sentence is definitely sticking with me haha. With that being said, does my background cause any issues in how the HC will view me? Especially since I did drop the ball a little on complexity analysis. UPDATE: Not only did I get an offer but they want me to come back for a SDI to try and uplevel me to L5!! Thanks everyone for calming my fears. You were all right! TC $210K YOE 10: Engineering 3: DS #google #SWE #L4
You’ll clear it. Recruiter was just being cautiously optimistic. I wouldn’t worry about getting the complexity wrong unless it was far off. Did you try to derive the complexity after running through the examples or code?
I did try to derive it. I twas mostly the DP and backtracking one, because in Google fashioned, they threw some extra quirks and constraints in there that was just throwing off my thought process on deriving the complexity. But I did at least try to point out each section in the code that was contributing the most to the complexity and articulate what the cost was for each section. Just missed little details here and there.
Nice! Seems like you could clear HC. I wouldn’t worry about missing tiny details
Bruh I feel like a pleb in your presence
I am better than no one - you can tell this because I'm on this site begging with everyone to ease my anxiety haha.
From your experience, it seems like questions were not too difficult. I was asked for 2 additional interviews because my questions on onsite were not challenging enough. I performed pretty bad on one of the additional interviews (only got approach right in last minute with no code). They downlevelled me to l3. I have no CS undergead too and worked as a Quant analyst for 2.5 years after undergrad. But got SWE job after completing computational analytics from GT and have been doing that since slightly less than an year.
Yeah i've read this has happened to a lot of people as well. This is the scenario I am most afraid of because I do have other offers that I doubt will stick around and wait for me to go through another round of interviews with Google, and then wait another 2-3 weeks to hear something back. If that happens, I'm just going to have to give up on Google for now =( In my opinion though, I wouldn't say the questions were TOOOO easy. The first one was a DP that started off easy, then they stepped it up after i got to the first optimal solution: "Ok great - so what if I wanted the algorithm to return [blank], how would you do that".
For my additional interviews, I got it scheduled just the next day of getting this feedback and HC happened 2 days later. My entire Google process from my first onsite, additional interviews and team match took 2.5 weeks. And it has not yet been 1 month since my onsite and I have already declined the offer. So it was very quick for me.
10 YOE, shouldn’t that be L5? Anyway I feel like if you did well on coding, the non swe experience shouldn’t matter
Yeah it's 10 YOE as an engineer - I'm not exactly coding massively parallel scalable systems with that role. What I've learned in my long time in industries is that YOE is probably one of the worst metrics to evaluate someone off of. I've consulted on Oil rigs way off the coast of Alaska with "seasoned" guys. I'm talking 20-30 years of experience, and they were some of the most worthless wastes of time and space. Meanwhile the 2-4 year guys are out there optimizing $25 milliion/day operations. I know my skills and my worth, and just because I have 10 YOE doesn't mean I'm L5 SWE. I like to set my bar of expectation right where it belongs haha
Best of luck. I have my L3 interview next week.
Why don't you like linkedin ? I declined Google for linkedin since linkedin offer was better.
Hey smash_king, congrats on at least getting through the onsites. I was mentally drained after mine. I did mine on Friday and then immediately bugged my recruiter on Monday to hurry a little because I had just gotten verbal offers from other companies on Monday, and I know some of them have a very quick expiration date. So I just communicated that with her and she immediately went and started bugging the reviewers to submit. My recruiter is actually awesome. She's pretty on the ball. I also interviewed with FB a couple of weeks ago. The process with Google is night and day than the process with FB. TBH I felt like the entire time in the FB interview, I was just stroking peoples' egos. There was def a few ppl who didn't bother to look at me or the screen. One guy seemed perturbed that even be bothered to have to interview a peon like myself, and just sat on his phone the whole time. It def put a bad taste in my mouth about FB in general. Oh well Google >>>> FB anyways
Hey OP, congrats, I know it has been a while ago, but did you clear the extra SDI interview? Was it hard?
Honestly a diverse background like yours is probably a good thing.
I dropped the ball a lot in my G interview, but articulating my thought process and showing excitement probably got me the offer.