RejectedSoftware Development Engineer at Google
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 0-1 Weeks
- Rounds
- 3
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Other
How it went
Don’t be afraid to explain your thought process and ask for feedback, Being confident about what you know is just as important as admitting what you don’t know.
What they would tell you
Don’t be afraid to explain your thought process and ask for feedback, Being confident about what you know is just as important as admitting what you don’t know.
How to prepare
- Start Simple, in the first round, I made the mistake of overcomplicating the problem when I should’ve started with the brute-force solution and optimized from there. Sometimes simplicity is the best starting point.
Their background
Around 1 year of internship experience, I have spent the last year solving DSA problems, participating in hackathons, and diving into system design.
Round by round
- 1
Screening Call25 min
Screening call with HR representative. It was mostly a casual chat, but they did ask me few questions about coding skills, and what languages I felt most comfortable with.
- 2
Coding Round 160 min
Problem: You are given a graph of cities where each vertice denotes a city, and the edges represent the connectivity between two cities. You can assume that the cost to travel from one city to another connected by a single edge is 1 unit. There are two friends, Emma and John, who live in two different cities and want to reach a destination city to attend a concert. Both Emma and John plan to take cabs from their cities to reach the destination. They may decide to share a cab in order to minimize the total cost to travel to the destination city. Your task is to find the minimum cost for both Emma and John combined to reach the destination.
- 3
Coding Round 260 min
Problem: You are given a list of words and need to return a list of palindromic pairs. A palindromic pair is a pair of words such that the concatenation of the two words forms a palindrome. A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards as it does backwards. For example, "race" + "car" forms the palindrome "racecar". Input: ["abcd", "dcba", "lls", "s", "sssll"] Output: [["abcd", "dcba"], ["lls", "s"]] Explanation: "abcd" + "dcba" forms a palindrome "abcd" + "dcba" = "abcd" + "dcba" = "racecar", so it's a valid pair. "lls" + "s" forms a palindrome "lls" + "s" = "llss", so it's a valid pair. The "sssll" + "s" does not form a palindrome, so it is not a valid pair.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.