Interview Experiences

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

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127 stories

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GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Longest Increasing Subarray and a Same-Night BQ Pass

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

A Custom Tile-Merging Game I Couldn't Finish Coding

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

L4, Four Rounds to Team Match

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In progressOnsiteXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Four Rounds, Positive Feedback, Now in Team Match

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In progressOnsiteXP0
GoogleMachine Learning Engineer
Jan 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Then Rejected

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Dec 2025

Bootstrap Proofs, Then a Soccer Shot Model and a Selection-Bias Puzzle

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Technical ScreenXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

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. Self-introduction, then the first question came smoothly: what…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Failed as a New Grad, Came Back for a Five-Round Onsite

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In progressOnsiteXP0
GoogleResearch ScientistSenior+
Dec 2025

Three Offers, Barely Any LeetCode

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OfferOnsiteXP0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Dec 2025

Two Back-to-Back Rounds, BQ Then DP

This year's Early Career interview process has two rounds, and each round includes two interviews, usually scheduled back to back on the same day. If you do well in the first round, you get invited to the second round. Round 1 This includes a BQ (behavioral) interview and a Tech interview. The BQ interviewer clearly had a list of questions and just went down it in order — I'd answer one and they'…

Onsite0
GoogleMachine Learning Engineer
Dec 2025

Rejected at the ML System Design Round

Sharing my rejection story — I just failed my Google Machine Learning Engineer interview at the last stage, so I'm writing it down while it's fresh, for anyone coming after me to avoid the same pitfalls. Process 5 rounds total: Phone screen (coding) Onsite coding, two rounds ML system design, one round Behavior/leadership, one round Process Review Phone Screen A LeetCode medium, a variant combini…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Dec 2025

OA, Two Virtual Rounds, Onsite in NYC, Rejected in January

This is a much-delayed writeup. I applied in early November 2025, got the OA two days later, and finished it that same night — they told me I passed right away and scheduled R1. A week later they gave me the specific R1 time. Coding and BQ were both on the same day. R1 tech was basically the exact LeetCode 295 (Find Median from Data Stream, two heaps). After I finished, we did a dry run plus comp…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

OA: Token-Hopping Coin Board and Shared-Digit Grouping

Two questions, 90 minutes, not hard. First question: given a string representing the board of a single-player game laid out horizontally, containing three possible values: '.', 'T', 'C'. '.' means the position is empty, 'C' means there's a coin at that position, and 'T' means the player's token is at that position. The board length is at most 100. The player has multiple tokens, and the movement…

Online Assessment0
GoogleData Scientist
Dec 2025

Rejected After Two Rounds of Stats and Causal Inference Questions

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Initially Rejected, Reopened by an HR Mistake, Then a Two-Round Virtual Onsite

Applied after getting a referral on 2025.10.01. Rejected on 2025.10.14. 2025.10.19 — Got an apology email from HR saying the application was mistakenly closed, and they sent me an OA. 2025.10.21 — Completed the OA. 90 minutes, two questions, the same ones that were already known online — very easy. 2025.10.23 — Got the invite for the first two rounds, scheduled for 10.30. 2025.10.30 — Round 1 tec…

In progressOnsite0
GoogleData Scientist
Dec 2025

My Strategy for Passing the Hiring Assessment Personality Test

As the first stage of the interview process, this one's pretty simple — but it would be a shame to get filtered out here. I looked through everything I could find online and combined it with my own experience to put together what I think is the most complete summary out there, to save everyone some time. Just read through this whole post and you should sail through it. What's the Google Hiring As…

Online Assessment0
GoogleData ScientistSenior+
Nov 2025

Rejected Everywhere Else Before Landing an All-Strong-Hire DSR Offer

I've read some experience posts on the forum before, and this is my way of giving back — my first post, sharing some of my own experience here. Some background first: I'm at a big company, I've been coasting for several years, and I felt like I was wasting away, so I planned to switch jobs earlier this year. It didn't go well though — I got rejected at the hiring manager round, then coding/SQL ro…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

A Behavioral Screen on Team Leadership, Answered via Scrum

Was it last month or the month before? The interviewer was young. The main questions were: Talk about one of your projects Some hypothetical questions around team playing and leadership — for example, if you were the team lead, how would you handle someone on the team blowing past a deadline, or how would you assign roles when the team runs into a new problem that nobody on the team is familiar w…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

Right-Side View BFS, Then a Pure Behavioral Round

R1: Technical interview. The interviewer was a senior frontend engineer. We did a bit of small talk up front, then went straight to the coding link. Q1: Given a binary tree, output all the nodes visible from the right side. I used BFS — each round, take all the nodes at the current level, output the last one, then push all the nodes of the next level into the queue. Q2: Given two arrays arr1 and…

HR Screen0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

A Two-Part Invoice Matching Coding Screen

We started with quick self-introductions on both sides — no deep-dive project questions. Then came two coding questions built around a single scenario; the questions and the amount of code involved weren't trivial. At the end I got to ask the interviewer some questions. Q1: Given the invoice ID inside a payment's memo, find the matching invoice in the invoice list and output the result. My approa…

Technical Screen0

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