Google L5 Onsite Review
Had my onsite today for L5 SWE. Below is a summary of my interview experience. 1. Coding: Variation of max island. Solved perfectly without help 2. Sys design. Open ended question. Did not go well. Expecting no hire on this. The interviewer was a staff engineer and walked circles around my design capabilities. Though I'm disappointed at doing badly in this round, it was great to observe a seasoned staff engineer articulate his sys design thoughts. 3. Coding. Data struct design. Solved perfectly. Was asked some multi threading questions later and messed those up 4. Coding. Bad interview. Was asked a string question not on leetcode. Solved using brute force which interviewer said was inefficient. Was able to figure out the optimal solution after the interview(facepalm). Googleyness. Frank conversation. Follow star technique. Meh. I am expecting a reject. Going into the interview I was hoping to do the 3 coding rounds well and try to get L4, as I was not sure of clearing L5 bar. Is there a chance of an L4 offer after this performance? This was also my third attempt in 3 years. 2 L4 and 1 L5 . Am I disbarrred from interviewing at G again ? Update: I got rejected for L5. They tried to match me for L4 but feedback in coding rounds was mixed. I have the option of appearing for 2 L4 coding rounds and they will send my packet to the hc with the additional feedback. Wondering if it makes sense to try L5 since I'm already a senior at Servicenow. TC 150 k cad. Yoe 5
Rip my Canadian friend I and u will be cad bound
Thanks for sharing! Hope they give you another chance but everyone is hiring so you'll make it eventually.
No you are screwed. That said, can you clarify some things? - what was sys design question and what you mean they ran circles around you? Did they implement Paxos in 2 mins? - what was the data structure - what solution strategy did you miss for the inefficient question (was it a backtracking problem or maybe O(log N) and you coded a O(N*N) ?)
1. My preparation of sys design is based on educative Io and other online sources. I do not have much experience actually designing complex systems in my work experience. That got exposed in the interview. I was not able to showcase sufficient depth after the initial high level design 2. Snapshot array. Follow up was snapshot map. 3. The optimal solution was to use a suffix tree. I brute forced it.
@desi thanks. Yeah thats pretty unfortunate if you never seen those pattern match type problems before you wouldnt know. You sure it was suffix trees and not KMP? Also was the snapshot array question worded oddly? Snapshot arrays are pretty easy to implement, you just don't have much multithreading experience? You'll get em next time champ. Did you study DDIA? As it really helps in learning tradeoffs and you can watch quick LinkedIn Learning videos to see applications afterwards
You can reapply in the future
Yes I can reapply. But I heard that they stop considering you after 3 failed attempts :(
Haven’t seen or heard about there being a limit myself.
plz keep us updated on the feedback, if any, good luck next time buddy,
Update: I got rejected for L5. They tried to match me for L4 but feedback in coding rounds was mixed. I have the option of appearing for 2 L4 coding rounds and they will send my packet to the hc with the additional feedback. Wondering if it makes sense to try L5 since I'm already a senior at Servicenow.
Sorry to hear that bud. I think you should just wait and apply next year. On top of this, have you applied for other companies? Google is a great name yes but so is Facebook, LinkedIn etc and their senior eng bars are lower.
Tough luck, sounds like a reject. Better luck next time 🤞