Google Interview Preparation For Software Engineer – A Complete Guide

Google… The top attractive employer and one of the highest paying companies in the world. Google opens a door for exceptional programmers who are not limited to solve problems they already know but also they should have skills to solve problems they haven’t encountered before. If you are one of them who has this skill and if you have a dream to land up a software engineer job role in Google then you need to follow a strategy and you need to understand the complete process that this company is looking for the hiring of top-notch programmers.

Google-Interview-Preparation

Hiring procedures in Google for the software engineering role is similar to other companies so we will discuss the programming skill that you must have and we will also discuss some other tips and details that you should keep in mind while applying at Google.

Important Points

Before we discuss all the details we highly recommend you to take a look on How we hire on Google career page and get familiar with interview process. For Google software engineering interview you can prefer any programming language you are comfortable with but you should know your programming language very well, It would be great if the choice is C++ or Java. Let’s discuss all the rounds one by one from getting the call for the interviews to cracking the interview in detail.

Getting Noticed by Google

Google receives more than two million resumes but hires only around 4000 employees every year so it’s not easy to get noticed by recruiters for interview calls. Take the referrals through some connections working in these companies or you can take the help of LinkedIn and online coding platforms to increase your chances for interview calls. Below are some points that will help you in getting the call for interviews…

Telephonic Interview

Once your resume will be shortlisted you will be invited for the technical phone interviews (Average 2 phone interviews) which are slightly different than onsite interviews but there you need to write code on some sharing tools like Google Doc and that will be visible to the interviewer. It will be for around 45 minutes covering Data Structures and Algorithms. You may encounter two questions and you are expected to write code for at least one of them. Below are some points to guide you for phone interviews…

Onsite Interview

After the phone interviews, Google conducts 4-6 onsite interviews including lunch interviews where lunch interview isn’t a real interview and it’s just the interaction with Googler. Each round roughly takes 45 minutes to one hour and this will be a whiteboard round and the majority of the Google interview consists of coding. Now here comes the role of DSA and Core CS subjects to check your coding, problem-solving skill and command over computer science fundamentals. Firstly you will go through the coding interview round and then system design (based on experience) round. The difficulty level of the question is based on the level you are applying for in Google.

1. Technical Coding Round and General Analysis Questions

Image Source: byte-by-byte.com

2. System Design Round:

What Interviewers Are Looking For?

“We are not simply looking for engineers to solve the problems they already know the answers to; we are interested in engineers who can work out the answers to questions they had not come across before.”

The above thing is the most important thing the interviewer will be looking for also read the below points…

Interview Evaluation Criteria: All the feedback is collected from different interviewer after the interview and then you are rated on a scale of 1-4 in a bunch of different categories that include your coding experience and analytical skill. This feedback is then sent to a hiring committee for the final decision.

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