- Coding: convert snake_case to camelCase (e.g. foo_bar -> fooBar). The input is guaranteed to be valid snake_case (no leading underscore, no trailing underscore, no double underscore).
The coding part was easy, I banged it out in under twenty lines within a few minutes, though I did spend a bit of time clarifying what counted as valid snake_case input since I wasn't totally sure what the interviewer meant.
Then the remaining 30+ minutes turned into open-ended brainstorming, and I honestly had no idea what he was actually testing for. The setup: there's a huge repo with tons of variables and function names in snake_case, too big to review by hand — how would you use the program above to rename all the snake_case variables to camelCase across the whole repo, how would you verify the repo still works after the rename, and how would you even test it (given that the test package itself might get renamed too)? Then we also got into third-party functions and public interfaces that must not be renamed, and how to tell those apart. The whole thing felt bizarre — basically he'd ask something, I'd answer a bit, and I couldn't see how any of it connected back to the coding problem. I didn't have much of an answer for most of it, and the feedback afterward said I failed this round.
- BQ: why do I want to join Google, what about Google's culture appeals to me, projects, that sort of thing.
Discussion
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