Google interview advice
Hey all, Interviewing at Google soon. I actually love my project right now, but could use a TC bump. So I'm not too concerned if I don't get in on the first try. My strat is 2 easy and 1 medium leetcode questions per day time boxed to 15 minutes for easy and 25 for medium. Going to take the questions from the Google category sorted by frequency, as I've seen suggested here before. Easy and medium, because I feel like interview tech questions tend to start off fairly easy, then get complexity added along the way. I have 3 weeks to prep, but might ask for an extra week. Plan for week 1 is to write major data structures from scratch. List, linked list, hashmap, graph (3 implementations - matrix, objects & pointers, and adjacency list), binary tree, AVL tree, and then a review a few standard algorithms: quicksort, mergesort, BFS, DFS, and finally in, pre, and post order tree traversal. Weeks 2, 3 will be leetcode. Anything else I should add? What kind of non-technical questions should I prep STAR stories for? Ie, "what's a tough problem you worked on?", "Why do you want this job?" yoe: 4-6 TC: 180-200 Aiming for SWE II.
Since you are looking for increasing your comp, let me suggest one thing, you need to get another offer from Oracle or Facebook to negotiate with Google. Google has some top class negotiators working for them and they wonβt give you a better salary unless you have competing offers with a better salary. Also, they might downlevel you regardless of how well you perform. As for getting in, leetcode has a section just for Google and I practiced that. Additionally, know graphs and dynamic programming problems really well. For non tech, they ask the basics like talk about a tough prob, etc. This was not the big part of their interview.
I was thinking about focusing heavily on trees and graphs. The prep mail I got listed them as particularly important. I didn't realize that Oracle paid that well. I was hoping for the 220-240 range. You think they'll low-ball? I have zero need to move, so I'm totally okay with walking away from an offer. Maybe I should aim for 2 months out instead of a few weeks. If I need to wrangle together some more interviews, it could take time to get them scheduled at the same time. I have a Microsoft interview liked up, but I doubt they'll be competitive.
They lowballed me and I thought I did really well. I was also willing to walk away as well and in the end they went up a bit and I only got a little more than Amazon. However, the recruiter was very clear that if I had an offer from any other company they would match it. I would also advice not telling any company that you are interviewing Google. I found that as soon as I mentioned Google the other side lost interest because they thought I was using their offer as leverage for the Google offer. Timing is key, I got an offer from another company way too soon and had to let the offer go.
Nobody will ask you to write an AVL tree Better get competitive offers if you want high TC
Hmm. Maybe I should put more time into this. It could take a while to line up multiple interviews around the same time.
My recruiter asked me to prepare LC medium and hard. Donβt bother to do easy.
Awesome, thanks!
Oh and learn Mandarin while you are at it. Google cloud office in Sunnyvale can pass off as a Shanghai building. Will help you interpret the heavily accented questions.
Start doing leetcode hard-mediums and actual hard ones. No one gives a fuck about easy ones. Don't waste your time, unless you're a leetcode newbie.
Thanks, captain planet!
I'm a leetcode newbie, but for every Amazon transfer I've done, I used Cracking the Coding Interview problems.