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 EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2025

A Wordle-Style Word-Guessing Coding Problem and a BQ Marathon

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OnsiteXP0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2025

Rejected the Same Night After Round 1

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Two Back-to-Back Screens, No Coding

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Technical ScreenXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Four Technical Rounds, One Interviewer Showed Up Late and Never Apologized

Overall the interview questions were pretty hard, but the interviewers were mostly friendly and did a good job guiding you along (except for one round). Google's interviews feel hard to prepare for — unlike Meta, which has a ton of interview writeups floating around. I think it really comes down to what you've built up over time. Technical: Statistics Question 1: Assume we have a sample with 100…

Onsite0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Phone Screen Plus Five Onsite Rounds, Passed HC

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OfferOnsiteXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

SQL, Metrics, and Modeling Across Two Rounds

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Two Case-Study Rounds, No Coding, Rejected After 3 Days

Round 1: Measurement & Modeling Concepts A case study: Google Meet has a big customer who complains that meetings keep dropping/disconnecting. They ask how you'd analyze and solve this problem, how you'd put together an analysis plan, and how you'd estimate the impact. If it's affecting retention, how do you build a model to predict retention (contract renewal)? How do you evaluate models, what a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

A Brutal CRR SQL Question with LAG and 4-5 CTEs

This isn't a super fresh write-up, but while I was prepping I noticed there weren't many Data Scientist interview experience posts here, so I'm sharing mine. First was the HR phone screen — we talked a bit about projects I'd worked on before and they asked about my SQL and Python experience. I passed and got scheduled for the first round. The first round had two sessions: they said it would be on…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Five Rounds Covering Stats, Modeling, R, and a Battery-Life Case Study

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OnsiteXP0
GoogleData Scientist
Oct 2025

Second-Round Onsite, One Interviewer Cancels via Late-Night Email

About a month or two ago I did my first round, which had two sessions, but I honestly don't remember what was covered. I guess I didn't do well, because there was no follow-up. Last week I suddenly heard that I'd be moving on to a second round. The second round was supposed to have three sessions, but the interviewer for one of them wasn't available and canceled on me by email in the middle of th…

In progressOnsite0
GoogleEngineering Analyst
Oct 2025

Trust Team Onsite, Two SQL Rounds and a BQ

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OnsiteXP0
GoogleData ScientistSenior+
Oct 2025

Cold-Called Into the DSR Track, All Strong Hire

I'd read a small handful of interview reports, and even those helped a lot. A bit of background first: I'm at a big company, I've been coasting for a few years, and it started to feel like I was wasting my time, so at the start of this year I decided to look for a new job. It wasn't smooth — I got rejected by hiring managers, rejected on coding or SQL, rejected at onsite, rejected at the final ro…

OfferOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

A Sliding Window Question I Couldn't Crack

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Technical ScreenXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Cracking the 111-Statement Personality Screen

Google has recently started requiring candidates to fill out a kind of psychometric test that checks their tendencies and behaviors in a work environment — things like communication style, collaboration, and problem-solving ability. This helps them judge whether a candidate has the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to succeed at the company. Because of the sheer volume of applications they…

HR Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Cutting Squares of Cake with Binary Search

One of my interview questions: There's a table, and the top-left corner of the table is the origin (0, 0). On the table there are countless non-overlapping square cakes of different sizes. The question: how do you make one horizontal cut (parallel to the x-axis) so that after the cut, the total cake area on each side is equal? The interesting part is that all the coordinates are floats, but the s…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2025

Straight to Onsite, Rejected After One Weak Review

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 res…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds from HashMap to OOD

Here's my interview experience: Round 1: A medium-difficulty string + hashmap question. I found the approach pretty much right away and had no trouble talking it through before I started coding. At the end there was a follow-up on how to make the code more production-ready. Round 2: An easy heap question. I basically figured out to use a heap and that solved it. The interviewer was pretty nice, a…

Onsite0
GoogleSite Reliability Engineer
Sep 2025

Coding, Networking, and a Distributed Rate Limiter

I interviewed for a Google SRE position a few days ago. The overall difficulty wasn't especially algorithm-heavy — it leaned more toward system design, real-world troubleshooting, and coding. Interview content Coding (LeetCode style) They asked a string-processing question: given a log file where each line is "timestamp, user, action," count the number of sessions per user. It was a variant of "g…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two OA Questions, No Hidden Test Cases

I finally got my Google OA, and I'm posting here right after finishing it. This OA had 2 questions total, 90 minutes, which keeps Google's usual style. Both questions were not too difficult overall. Problem 1 (paraphrased) You have a one-dimensional board, and each cell can be in one of three states: empty, a piece, or a coin. On each turn, you can choose any piece and move it 3 cells to the righ…

In progressOnline Assessment0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Interviewer Told Me Mid-Round I'd Failed the Parentheses DP Problem

Round 1: The input is a string made up of parentheses and numbers, something like "(( ))2 )1( )". Index: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Element: ( ( ) ) 2 ) 1 ( ) Say the index of a number is i — for example the number 2 is at index 4, and the number 1 is at index 6. For a given number, you have to pick: Exactly that many parentheses to remove. For the number 2, you pick two parentheses from before it and rem…

RejectedOnsite0

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.

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