Tech Industry
Yesterday
2221
What happens when most of your team is Indian?
Software Engineering Career
Yesterday
413
Salesforce SMTS vs Google L4
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1289
Women, help me understand why this is inspirational
Tech Industry
3d
59942
Crossed a line with my boss
Health & Wellness
Yesterday
379
Lasik cost
I had my google phone interview recently. I was expecting a Leetcode medium or hard type of question and I prepared my mind to dive deeper into algorithmic thinking and optimization/complexity analysis. But the interviewer asked me a straight forward problem on strings which was like a practical question. I analyzed the question and the inputs and started thinking out loud by telling him the approach I would proceed but he stopped me and said I didn't think about edge/corner cases and he told the edge cases himself. He didn't stop with a hint or allow me to think. I went back and listed the edge cases and incorporated them into the solution and coded the solution. But I didn't get through the round. I feel bad that I didn't even pass the phone screen and it was not even due to leetcode hard kinda situation. Usually I think about edge cases after solving/coding the problem but the interviewer expected me to say them before starting to think about the solution and this ruined my interview. Is this a pattern google expects during interviews? TC: 170k CAD 5yoe #google
I failed my first phone screen too and my profile doesn’t get picked up by google anymore :(
Get a good referral
oh that's scary.. They gave me a cool period of upto 18 months
That means this. He wants to follow the for what ppl got to say.
this is not google style. I am sorry that you get such a bad luck and experience. This interviewer need to go back and do that training again. But just try somewhere else, it's not your fault, there are many other great companies that you can show your coding skills.
You mean leetcode skills?
Don’t let this get you down. I’ve given many interviews and it sounds like the interviewer has areas to improve. (Interviewing is a learned skill too.). It sounds like they expected you to ask lots of clarifying questions before starting to think how to solve the problem. However, in reality, those questions, in my opinion, are not about finding edge cases. They are to make sure you, the candidate, has collected the correct requirements (ie is resolving ambiguities in the question so you are answering the correct question). It is perfectly fine, in my opinion, to potentially miss some edge cases until after you properly clarified the question and started thinking of solutions. Sometimes it’s only then that some edge cases become clear. I’ve never failed a candidate with a correct working solution because they didn’t identify edge cases soon enough unless those cases were so important the candidate was actually solving a different question. Even in that case though, I would steer the candidate by saying there are more or different requirements. Only if they repeatedly ignored my updates and didn’t incorporate them in their solution would I consider it a big enough problem to warrant failing an interview. Still though, I would look at the candidate’s performance as a whole.
Thanks for the comment. Exactly... I just needed a hint and I would have identified the edge cases myself. And I might have also come across them at the end in the worst case. Anyways, I do realize that I could have asked more clarifying questions around the inputs which would have covered the edge cases. And that's why I was thinking if that's the main criteria he expected in that round out of me.
Sounds like you took too long to get through the warm up question. Sorry, interviews suck on both sides.
You mean there was another question in store like FB?
Maybe? Usually the follow up question will build on the warmup question. If you don't do well on the warmup they won't even mention the follow up. This makes the candidate feel better because they won't even know they only scored 50% and also is less awkward for the interviewer than watching someone flounder.
Do you applied for Engineering productivity team ?
I guess so.. I applied for a role in Kitchener
In my first phone screen with Google, for an internship years ago, I was asked find needle in haystack. I gave the O(mn) solution, talking about the edge cases first (null needle, etc). Then I had the audacity to say I can simply use haystack.find(needle) in python which implements KMP and runs in O(m+n) time. I got a reject (expected) and no feedback. The interviewer never made me feel bad but I still laugh at my naivety of using return m.find(n) as my final answer.
Don't worry chin up. The last time I interviewed at Google, I walked out of the on-site smiling because I thought I nailed all 5 rounds. I was rejected, it happens. You just have to take the learnings and apply it next time.
🍿
What does this mean :D
This means I'm interested to know other people's responses and I'm essentially following your post. Common blind convention to use "popcorn" as following.