Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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153 stories

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GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Back-to-Back Phone Screens: Behavioral, Then an HTTP Router

After I finished the psychological test, they scheduled my phone interviews right away. It was two rounds back to back, 45 minutes each, and I don't know if that's normal. The first round was a behavioral round with a really nice interviewer. All the questions were the usual ones: what do you do if you disagree with a coworker, what do you do if you disagree with another team, what do you do if a…

Technical Screen1
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2026

A Huge YAML Merge Problem and a Knapsack That Wants Quickselect

The first-round interviewer was really nice, but the problem was super long. Reading and understanding the problem plus the examples can take maybe 20 minutes. Roughly, it is merging two trees (YAML files), where every node has merge rules, and there are a lot of rules. The approach is DFS plus rule matching. The second-round interviewer gave me a knapsack problem, but for this one DP or DFS with…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

In-Person Onsite with a Design Round and a Train Schedule Question

The onsite was in-person (but virtual was an option) and only two rounds. I only had 4 interviews total with Google. Onsite was solutions design and Leetcode question. Solutions design question was design a review ingestion platform for an e-commerce site that takes reviews and summarizes them with an LLM for an internal dashboard. Focus on trust and safety, prompt injection, data sanitization, P…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Round 2 With Two Coding Questions and a URL Router

Coding 1: LeetCode 210. The follow-ups were all very easy: Add a validity check Time/space complexity Test cases Change the output to a nested list Coding 2: Implement a URL request handler router that needs to support two functions: processHandler(String handler): registers a handler, for example /users/delete or /users/{userId}/photo/{photoId}. getHandler(String url): takes a real URL, for exam…

Onsite0
GoogleData Scientist
Sep 2026

An Unexpected Forecasting Question and a Fast Offer Timeline

I signed Google's offer a couple of days ago, though I still have a few other issues to resolve. I'm sharing my interview experience and preparation package, and hoping I can start smoothly. First round Stats: Questions about p-values, simple linear regression, confidence intervals, and similar topics. Data: Compare two vendors' models. There are similar questions in other interview reports. Seco…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Mouse, Cheese and Cat Grid Path, a Googlyness Manager Question, and a Non-Axis-Aligned Max Rectangle

Phone Interview 1 Warmup Question: Given an N x N grid with a start cell S and a target cell T, where some cells are impassable water. You can only move horizontally or vertically. Determine whether a path from S to T exists. Main Question: Given an N x N grid. A mouse starts at S and the goal is the cheese at T. The grid also has impassable water cells and a cat C. The mouse can only move horizo…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen, Googlyness, and Two Graph-Heavy Onsite Rounds

Phone Interview Given an n x m matrix, the start is (n-1, 0) and the end is (n-1, m-1). The allowed moves are up-right, right, and down-right. Count the total number of paths to the end. Follow-up 1: There are some checkpoints in the matrix. Count the total number of paths that visit all of the checkpoints. Follow-up 2: The checkpoints must be visited in order. Given that every move changes the c…

Onsite0
GoogleEngineering Analyst
Sep 2026

Four Team Matches and a Verbal Offer After a Long Loop

A friend started referring me around September 2025. I had a recruiter screen in October, but the HM decided not to interview me. A team I applied to in February this year offered me an interview. The rough timeline: 3/9/2026 Recruiter reached out. 4/2/2026 RRK case, interviewed by a team member. 4/9/2026 Passed. 4/27/2026 RRK case + SQL, interviewed by a team member. 5/11/2026 Passed. 5/22/2026…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

10-Minute Resume Grill, Then First Missing Positive in O(1) Space

The interview started right on time and went straight into an intense 10-minute resume grill. The interviewer homed in on my recent backend work, specifically asking detailed questions about the Kafka streaming architecture and Redis caching implementations from my previous internship in the Platform Cloud org. They also dug into the technical trade-offs I made when building Bastion, focusing hea…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

findBestAnagram, Three BQs, Downleveled from L5 to L4 After R1

Coding: findBestAnagram For details, see these two posts on LeetCode Discuss: a Google L3/L4 phone screen post Round 2 of a Google SWE II (L3) post BQ: Conflict: Tell me about a time you have to compromise, and how will you act differently after it. Are you satisfied with the result? Did you do anything to make it happen later? Imagine you’re part of the Google Photos team, and your feature detec…

In progressTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

L4 Most-Active-User Coding Went Fine, Rejected After a Relentless BQ Round

Coding: There are different messages, undirected (A, B). I had to write a method register to store these messages, and another method mostActiveUser() that computes and returns the person who has messaged the most users. I clarified the problem, used a hashmap, and finished writing it quickly. For space complexity I said O(N) at first, but he pointed out that every key maps to its own set, and I…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

L4 Timeline, Meeting Rooms II, and an Offline-Sync Design Round

07/27: got the questionnaire 08/11: recruiter connected 08/24: R1, and R2 got scheduled the same day 09/17: R2 Coding 1: Meeting Rooms II Coding 2: Jump Game Design: design the client-side part of a system where users can edit some data. The network isn't always reliable, so while editing it needs to support local storage, and sync the edits with the server once the network comes back. There can…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

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 a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Two OA Questions: Score Buckets and Reading Chapters by Day

Question 1: Given an array of integers (vector of ints), the index represents a student ID and the corresponding value is that student's score on the exam. The grading criteria are as follows: failed < 50%: failed 50% <= score <= 80%: regular pass > 80%: pass with distinction Return an array of 3 elements, representing the number of students who failed, the number with a regular pass, and the num…

Online Assessment0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Onsite Coding Rounds and Communication Friction

r1 Given a connections array, where connections[x] is a list representing the neighboring nodes of x in a graph, and a broken value representing a damaged node, return the minimum number of nodes that must be traversed from start to destination without passing through broken. The solution could use DFS or BFS. I used DFS. The follow-up allowed traversal through broken nodes. r2 Implement a word p…

In progressOnsite1
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Reported Aug 2026

Google and Netflix L4 Offers Lost to a Visa Problem

TL;DR: There is no big-tech name on my resume and my job title is unremarkable, yet I made it through the Google, Netflix and Meta processes and ended up holding L4 offers from Google and Netflix. My visa status ultimately wrecked both. Below is how I got ready. About me: I was a government contractor for eight years. The job was nothing exciting, but I kept teaching myself new technologies and s…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An L4 Loop Downleveled to L3

I recently interviewed for Google L4 R1 and R2. After the interviews, I was downleveled to L3. Round 1 Coding: Given a file system containing directories and files, where each file has a size and each directory contains files or another directory, calculate the total entity size for a given ID that may identify either a directory or a file. It was somewhat like a wrapped version of LeetCode 339.…

In progressOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

L4 Phone Screen and Three Onsite Coding Rounds

Phone Interview Given a binary tree representing reporting relationships in a company, where each node represents an employee and its parent represents the employee's direct manager, write an algorithm to find the nearest common manager of a given set of multiple employees. This is a variant of Lowest Common Ancestor. There are K employees in the set and the tree height is H. Optimize the time co…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Grid Signals and a Blocker-Removal Follow-up

Given a grid representing a city, it contains the following kinds of entities: Sources (S): Emit signals. Blockers (B): Block signal propagation. Empty cells (.): Signals can pass through freely. Targets (T): Need to receive a signal. Signals start simultaneously from all sources. Each unit of time, they move one cell in each of four directions: up, down, left, and right. Signals cannot pass thro…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Interviews Across Months and Unfinished Team Matching

I applied to Google quite a while ago, probably in March, and got an interview in May. The process dragged on for a long time. I kept practicing problems, and fortunately I eventually passed, but unfortunately team matching didn't work out. I've now gone to NVIDIA. The first round was online in May. It was a coding question, roughly like this (I asked AI to summarize it): Connected Crop Arrangeme…

In progressOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

Share your experience to earn XP