Google Software Engineer Interview Experience — My Best Behavioral Round Yet

Last week's BQ (behavioral questions) interview report — I posted the coding round separately on the forum too.

The BQ round was scheduled separately. It was originally supposed to be combined with another round, but got rescheduled at the last minute, so there ended up being a week's gap between them.

They didn't ask about my resume.

1. Self-introduction, then the first question came smoothly: what was your biggest challenge?
   I answered with something that came up unexpectedly during my internship. Follow-up: how did you measure the percentage improvement in your outcome? I said the growth was visible from the dashboard.

2. What difficulty did you overcome?
   I answered with a bug from my internship and how I solved it. Follow-up for details: did you do anything to remediate it afterward, what measures did you take? Afterward I wrote a doc to record it, and I also brought it up in a meeting.

3. This past year, what have you done to improve yourself?
   First, continuous English practice — Duolingo and things like that. Then technical improvement — blogging, contributing to open source projects. Follow-up: which open source project? I named one, and said this project wasn't about how hard it was, but about using technology to solve a real problem in a way that was compelling. I described the project and how I built it. All pretty simple descriptions, nothing I went very deep on.

4. Conflict.
   I disagreed with someone else, and in the end I laid out facts and examples and they went with my idea. The first three were prepared really well, but this one wasn't as strong, so they pushed for more detail: besides laying out the data, what else did you do? Why did the other person propose their idea in the first place? How did you get them to trust you?

After about forty minutes, there were five minutes left for me to ask questions:
What's your favorite project?
How do you usually communicate when you run into problems?

Tips: Xiaohongshu interview reports are mostly not accurate — a lot of the questions there are phrased in a really roundabout way, so you can't tell at first glance whether a given question is about conflict or challenge; you have to actually think it through. But this interviewer clearly had a script, reading through it item by item — the questions were basically very simple and direct, and the keyword you're looking for shows up right away. The interviewer was also really enthusiastic, or at least very high-energy — this was the best BQ interview I've had.