Google Software Engineer Interview Experience — Behavioral Plus a %KEY% Env-Var Parser, Rejected After R1

Background

2.5 years of experience, Java backend at the "banana" company.

Timeline

• 5/7 mass-applied to SWE III - Bay Area
• 7/8 xWF reached out (I did the GHA last year and then got rejected at the resume stage, so this time it was skipped entirely)
• 8/5 R1 day

R1 was all on one day: 45 min behavioral + 45 min technical.

Behavioral

Self-intro first, then pretty common questions. The main ones they asked:

• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker.
• Tell me about a mistake you made and how you resolved it.
• Tell me about a time when a teammate left the team and you had to take over their project.
• Tell me about a time you took the initiative to fix a problem.

Basically they have you tell a concrete example, then they follow up.

For example, the teammate departure one was mainly about: if a teammate suddenly left, how would you take over the project they had? I answered that I'd first go through the handoff doc to understand the project's context, progress, that kind of thing. Then the interviewer followed up: what if it happened really suddenly and there was no handoff?

Coding: String Parsing

The problem was roughly:

Something like shell environment variable substitution. The setup is that you set env vars in .zshrc, then do %KEY% substitution in a string.

.zshrc has: export NAME = "Tom"

Then there's an input: Hello I'm %NAME%

You have to write a class that can store environment variables, then parse this string and replace %NAME% with the corresponding value.

Final output: "Hello I'm Tom"

The way I understood it at the time, it's basically implementing a simple environment variable store + parser.

There would be interfaces roughly like:

set("NAME", "Tom")
get("NAME")
parse("Hello I'm %NAME%")

After I finished writing the code I just said I was done. The interviewer reminded me to dry run a few more test cases + edge cases, and it turned out there was a small bug. Only after I fixed it did it count as done.

Two days after the interview I got an email from xWF. Rejected, as expected.