Google (Senior) Software Engineer interview questions

The interview process was quiet exhausting & one can find people from various academic backgrounds attending the interview. The average length of the interview process is somewhat like 30-40 days with mostly 5 interviews. Of course, getting a job at google is not at all easy. You have to be the best in your field of study to clear the interview.

Asked a friend to refer me internally. Was contacted by recruiter within two days. Since I was local and had a referral, phone screen was waived and I went straight to the on-site interview. Google offers an interview preparation class. Although it doesn't cover anything groundbreaking, it is still worthwhile to attend. On-site loop consisted of five 1:1 interviews and a lunch. Lunch is your chance to ask questions about the company and environment. You are not graded on it. The actual interviews had algorithms/data-structure questions and system design questions. I also got the feeling that questions about your past experience weren't that important either. They were just a way to help you relax before the real questions. Sharing specific questions is against the NDA is kind of pointless. Google question pool is large. There are many specific questions already posted here on glassdoor. I went though roughtly 100 interview descriptions here with specific questions and didn't get any of these questions during the interviews. Doesn't mean that that time was wasted - this was very good practice. For the algo questions - just know your data structures and basic algorithms, practice solving problems for a few weeks and you should do just fine. System design questions focus on designs Google-scale distributed systems. I suggest reading up on MapReduce and similar things. Study or practice with modern NoSQL distributed storage engines, know where usual bottlenecks are and you should do fine. Also read up on the materials that Google recruiters recommend - they are relevant. The "anti-loop" thing can be real and you can fail the interview even if you are well qualified. I was told that people really interested in working at Google should plan on interviewing 2-3 times. Then came the awkward part - negotiating the compensation... For whatever reason Google wanted me to commit to joining before sharing the numbers. While this was going on I got offers from some other companies in the area and this has finally forced Google's hand and compensation numbers were shared with me. The numbers were extremely good (having a few competing offers surely helped). But in the end I decided to accept an offer from another company. It was a very tough call since, based on a lot of data, Google is a great place to work at. Unfortunately one can only work in one place at a time.