Google Software Engineer Interview Experience — Straight to Onsite, Rejected After One Weak Review

Google·Software Engineer·Sep 2025
OnsiteNew GradRejectedmedium

Referred by a friend on 4/7 for an early career role. Got an "aha" notification on 4/20, HR reached out on 5/1, and had the HR call on 5/13. No OA, no phone screen — straight to onsite. 3 coding rounds + 1 BQ round. I got lucky — all 3 coding interviewers turned out great.

Round 1 was a trie problem. The problem statement wasn't very clear, and I got nervous while coding, so I forgot to store results — I just kept returning the latest answer. When she had me dry run it, I caught the issue, but there wasn't enough time — I only managed to finish the coding part, with no time left to explain. Feel normal.

Round 2, the interviewer had me classify a bunch of movies. Went smoothly using BFS/DFS, then dry run. Afterward we talked about whether the problem could be solved a different way, and discussed the drawback of using DFS versus other approaches. Feel positive.

Round 3 was the knapsack problem, very classic — I wrote it very smoothly, but this interviewer had very high standards for my dry run. I dry ran every single result. Then he changed the problem to bounded knapsack, but after writing it down I ran out of time to dry run it. Still, I had a great time chatting with the interviewer about other things. Feel positive.

Round 4 was BQ. We talked about how to communicate day-to-day with your boss and across teams — because of my past work experience, where I had to work directly with clients as a tech person and also collaborate with marketing and UX/UI teams, I had a lot to share, so we just kept talking. Feel positive.

Rejected. A week later, HR told me all it takes is one person giving you a bad result, so I'm frozen for a year. 🔥

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Google
Role
Software Engineer
Level
New Grad
Rounds
Onsite
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2025
Questions from this interview
4 questions

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