PSA: Google does NOT tend to ask very hard algorithm/whiteboarding questions.
There is a rumor that we love to taunt technical interviewees with unrealistically insane problems requiring advanced data structures at the ICPC or Codeforces/Topcoder level. This is false. Most of the questions asked for SWE candidates are only LC medium level, if you can trust our internal poll on Blind. Misinformation easily occurs due to the common human psychological bias of recalling only the most extreme events, or over-estimating one's abilities relative to peers. These popular stories are more viral online and interesting as news headlines, but rare in reality. If someone gets down-leveled because of interview performance (either weak knowledge on CS fundamentals or poor communication skills), don't blame a bad interviewer or hate on the system. HC will take variance of difficulty into account and throws out outliers in the feedback loop.
Cool
medium while banning all public questions is equiv to hard
Google does a terrible job at banning public questions. The questions get leaked and interviewers keep asking them for months after they are banned.
none of mine were public so what u mean terrible job nvm dunno wtf u saying as u edited ur post multiple times
87 votes. Well that is conclusive polling data if I’ve ever seen it.
If you've ever taken an introductory stats class, FYI the 95th percentile confidence intervals on LC hard problems is (0.11, 0.29).
Also not everyone at google is part of the hiring process. Pretty solid sample
Question starts at easy/med. The follow-up questions r always hard.
Trick is to not let question end up going to hard mode.
^ lol
I find DP problems hard. Maybe with more practice I’d consider them more “leetcode medium” material. My experience with Google: they’re looking for every reason to not hire you, likely due to a fear of false positives.
Also, there are different levels of LC medium. Some are equivalent to LC hard. And as someone above said, they end up with LC hard (follow ups).
Yeah Google needs to fix their whole process. Nowadays it's taking almost 3-4 months and thats just screams Google doesn't care about potential new employees
Why 3-4 months?
At these numbers you’ll get 1 in 5 interviewers giving a hard question. I think that’s accurate. Nobody expects 5 hards, but 4 mediums and a hard is really difficult to do perfect on.
I noped out after the recruiter told me the process takes 3 months. Ain't nobody got time for that.
TC?