I interviewed recently in Sunnyvale. First onsite interview. Out of 3 coding questions i did 2 of them great and missed an edge case on 1. (feedback from recruiter) Then they said they needed more data so we arranged 2 phone interviews. On both of them i did ok. (not perfect but pretty good in my opinion) From the phone interview feedback one of them said the code was not clean( i think google docs should not be used for this btw) and the other said the solution was not optimized. Then got rejected. What is the standards for passing the HC. I was told that i failed on coding part. The reason i start to think that the bar is so high because in each of these not so great coding sessions i missed different things. only 1 non optimized, 1 not clean, 1 edge case. Is there something like, we hire at worst 4 great and 1 ok interview results? I really appreciate those who managed to get hired. :)
You cannot "botch" any interviews. You must do at least decent on all and well on at least one. This is really subjective, but generally if there isn't a strong signal from anyone or if you miserably failed one, you're not going to get in. Not perfect, but it's been working.
Why were the questions hard?
they were leetcode med-dif questions. none of them were easy warm up kind. and i guess i couldnt focus on the phone interviews. But still i was able to come up with solutions i think. May be i wasnt able to give good signals besides solving the questions.
Yeah, any solution isn't going to pass the bar. A good solution with strong implementation (algorithm to code) is considered a hire from my experience.
I believe Google decides on a point system very similar to gpa (out of 4.0). You need at least 1 of the interviewers to be an advocate for hire and you can botch 1 interview.