My experience getting into Google

Since a few people asked about this I figured I'd make a thread about it. This was my experience going in, the interview, and getting the offer from Google. Full disclosure I'm going to blur a few of the details for anonymity. This wasn't my first time going through the interview, I interviewed once before and was rejected Initial recruiter screen: My recruiter reached out to me over email via a referral from a friend. He wasn't a Googler but was also going through the interview process. I touched base with him and he was able to get me started on the interview process My first phone screen was 45 minutes. The call was pretty quick and I was asked a counting problem that was a variation on counting stairs. The interviewer was pretty cold but I solved the problem brute force pretty quickly. He then went on to ask me if I could optimize it further. I kept optimizing until I eventually had a DP solution. He seemed satisfied and ended the interview 15 minutes early I heard back within 2 days that I moved forward to the onsite and was going to be connected with a new recruiter All of the recruiters were gracious and kind and really added clarity to the entire interview process. They were very responsive to emails (within 24 hours) and overall I had a really good interview experience. Once I had my initial call with the onsite recruiter, I signed up for an interview slow about 2 weeks from the call date. I was informed that the interview was broken up into 5 parts, behavioral and googliness & leadership, as well as 4 coding. The day of the onsite I got 14 hours of sleep the night before. I can't stress this enough, a good night sleep is a million times more valuable than an extra 2-3 hours of study. I was amped and ready to take it on. The googliness and leadership was first and it was a pretty standard behavioral interview. The interviewer was nice and nudged me in the right direction when he felt like I was falling off course. He seemed pretty satisfied with my answers and I answered with the STAR method and communicated my past experiences to the best of my ability Interview 2: This was a pretty standard coding interview. At this point I was pretty late into my interview process so we didn't exchange much pleasantries and went straight into the problem. He gave me a very standard graph problem that could be solved with a DFS. When I was done coding the solution he asked me if there was situation for which this code could break. Knowing this is a hint to find edge cases, I pointed out one and made the changes that would turn this into a DP solution. He asked me the runtime and seemed satisfied with the answer. This interview ended 15 min early Interview 3: This was a more rapid fire interview. We didn't really exchange much pleasantries and went straight into the problem again. He gave me a classic sliding window problem trying to find pattern that belongs to a blacklist. Getting a linear solution was pretty fast, I managed to finish the first part within 5-10 minutes. After that it was very rapid fire changes to the code to cover different scenarios (think what if one input becomes larger, the other becomes larger, how to make it more efficient) At the end he asked if there was any other data structures I could use to solve this problem and the run time/space tradeoffs for using either. This interview ended about 5 minutes early Interview 4: This was a OOP interview and he asked me a classic data structures question. Again we didn't really exchange pleasantries, he introduced himself, and then we went straight into it. I finished the problem in 15-20 minutes and he digging deeper into the runtime analysis of the solution. Since I used python for the interview he pointed out one interesting thing that I didn't know about with how Python works and I changed the code to make it slightly more efficient (reduced it by an exponent). He seemed satisfied and then since we had another 10 minutes chat about my favorite data structure and how it works Interview 5: This was another coding question and was focused on Greedy algorithms. They gave me the problem statement and asked me to start coding. There wasn't much of a structure to the problem but there was a very solid end goal. I started by talking about the approach and how to store the data, the solution involved using a sliding window with a hash map. I talked through the solution and pointed out a key insight to reduce the complexity of the solution. Once I was done coding the initial solution, the interviewer asked me the runtime and if there was another data structure I couldve used to answer the problem. I pointed out an alternative and they asked me to code it out. I finished about 5 minutes over time. They seemed satisfied I heard back within 24 hours I passed and will be moving forward to final review. Here I had to put together a packet to put towards hiring committee. There was some back and forth and my recruiter asked me if there were any other pending offers or onsite interviews. I mentioned one and she said she would try to rush my packet through. It took about 2-3 weeks before receiving the hire decision from HC From here team match took about 1-2 weeks. I got my first set of team match interviews within a week and then received one more the week after. I matched with one after 2 weeks in team match. From there I got connected with the recruiter after the team matches were finalized, gave my comp numbers, and received an offer within 3 business days. After I signed, the rest was all paperwork, background check, etc. TC: 350k first year 295k average over 4 years YOE - 1.7 formally at a FAANG 3 years founder experience before Level - L4 in a HCOL area Leetcode Stats: 88 solved How I prepped: I tried not to brute force leet code problems, but I did about 1-2 a day and only focused on areas that I struggled with. I skipped most dictionary problems and focused on graphs, dp, sliding window, and trees. I also watched a video a day about data structures and algorithms to brush up on the more obscure ones like disjoint sets, red black trees, etc Overall I studied about 1-2 hours a day for about 4 weeks before the interview