Google

Got recruited by Google for an SWE role after a LinkedIn inmail, made it through the behavioral assessment and online coding challenge, then ran out of time in the first technical interview after spending too long on intro questions and not being able to code up a backtracking solution. Googleyness round still pending, so the verdict isn't in yet.

Interviewed at Google for a software engineer role. Behavioral went well apparently, but the coding round is what got me. They passed, and I'm looking at a 6-month wait before I can try again.

Had a Google SWE round where the interviewer skipped a written problem statement entirely and just showed me an image, expecting me to figure out what the problem even was before solving it. Managed to identify it as a graph problem about finding max node values, but ran out of time before I could work through the adjacency list construction properly. Came out of it pretty unsure whether any of that was enough.

Four rounds for a Google SWE position. Three went well enough that I felt decent walking out, but the last onsite left me sweating. Needed a hint on the base problem, made a few dumb coding mistakes in the follow-up, and now I'm just waiting and hoping the earlier rounds carry enough weight.

Two coding rounds for a Google SWE campus role, both went well technically, still got rejected. The second interviewer was difficult to work with and the question was barely coherent for the first 20 minutes, but I cracked it anyway. Didn't matter.

Went through the full loop for a Research Engineer role at Google, technical and behavioral rounds all went well, but the coding interview tanked the whole thing. No offer, but the recruiter suggested trying again in a year, which may or may not mean anything.

Cleared two technical rounds at Google for a Software Engineer role after cramming DSA patterns in a week, and now heading into a 45-minute behavioral round focused on leadership and cultural fit. The technical questions were a mix of hard greedy/string problems and medium-level sliding window and binary search problems.

System design round at Google for a senior engineering role. One question, big scope: design a web crawler at Google scale. The kind of problem where you can talk for an hour and still feel like you barely scratched the surface.

Prepping for a Google onsite for a software engineering role and trying to figure out what the actual coding environment looks like on the day. Mainly wanted to know if it's a real IDE with autocomplete or the same barebones Google Docs-style editor from the earlier rounds, and whether they ask you to run code against test cases.

Google SWE coding round, one problem the whole time. Tree validation, which sounds straightforward until you're actually in the room trying to remember every edge case you've ever seen.