How I Cracked the Google Coding Interview (from unemployment)

hey everyone welcome back i've gotten a lot of comments and messages asking me how i got into google and about the interview process so i guess today i wanted to tell you my story i'll tell you how i got the interview how i prepared for the interview what i did on the interview day and how the five interview rounds went so to start with the way i got my interview was pretty basic i pretty much just called applied online which is probably one of the worst ways you can do because your application just gets tossed into an ocean of thousands and thousands of other applications but actually i had already interviewed with google before about two years before that i had made it all the way to the onsite though i didn't pass i think i got pretty close so maybe that's why i was able to get another interview relatively easily but i definitely think if you can get a referral it definitely increases your chances also a lot of people say that you know reaching out to recruiters on linkedin also can increase your chances rather than just applying online i've never tried either of those things but i'm sure they're somewhat helpful i think a few weeks after that i was reached out to by a technical sourcer which is not a recruiter but i think sorcerers are people that kind of find interview candidates and then forward them to recruiters so that's exactly what happened after that i got an email from a recruiter and then i set up a call with the recruiter it wasn't really an interview or anything like that they didn't ask me anything not behavioral not coding interview questions they basically just walked me through what the interview process was going to be like and they were going to help me schedule my interview the problem was after i talked to them it had been weeks and they never sent me like a follow-up email of how i could schedule my interview and i got really nervous at this point because they were really nice to me when i was talking to them so i was like you know what happened i kept emailing them didn't get a response i texted them didn't get a response i was really out of options so at this point i literally just emailed the technical sourcer who was the original person that reached out to me and i just said like hey i'm not getting any response from my recruiter are they on vacation did they quit google what's going on and i'm really glad i did that because literally the same exact day my recruiter replied to me so i don't know if they were ghosting me on purpose or what was what exactly was going on but it kind of just shows you you really can't trust recruiters that much and this is not the first time i've had a bad experience with recruiters you really have to fight for yourself and not rely so much on them thankfully i did get my interview scheduled though it was about three months after i had originally got reached out to by the recruiter so you can tell that the interview process at google is quite slow but at the same time this also gave me a ton of time to prepare for the interviews which is exactly what i did now the shortest answer i can give you for how i prepared is pretty much exactly what i did on this channel you know during that time during 2021 i was pretty much uploading leak code videos almost every single day and that's pretty much how i was practicing now i know the channel is not super organized which is why i created neatcode.io which basically structures the channel in a more like beginner-friendly way in an organized way of how you can use the channel to prepare kind of the same way that i did kind of by learning patterns in an organized way that's really the approach that i took i wish i could tell you that there was some you know super secret thing that i did that increased my chances but there really wasn't i basically just grinded and practiced data structures and algorithms just like on this channel just like you can do on nikko.io and more than just like memorizing the code for a bunch of solutions i really kind of tried to understand the problem understand the concepts the same way that i try to explain them in my videos understanding the time complexity the space complexity the trade-offs the thought process behind each solution things like that i think are very very important for google coding interviews more so than a lot of other companies which basically are fine with you sometimes just memorizing the solution and then came the actual interview day i was pretty confident in my abilities when the time came i didn't really feel like there was any more that i could practice that would increase my chances and the good thing was that i only had one interview day i didn't have any phone screen i was able to skip that i think it's because i had already interviewed with google before and i had made it to the on-site but also my interviews were virtual because this was of course during the pandemic i think maybe the fact that the interviews were virtual made me a little less nervous but another thing i did to kind of calm my nerves during the interview day was to get up a little bit early in the morning and just kind of do some light exercising for like 30 to 45 minutes exercising i think is a really good way to lower your stress and anxiety it kind of decreases your cortisol levels and things like that and it's probably much better than what some people do if they get super nervous i know some people even try to take alcohol or like xanax or things like that i mean maybe that will make you less nervous but i think it's also going to affect your performance i used to consider doing that but i don't think it would have been worth it and i think actually exercising did help me a bit during the day but for some reason honestly i just wasn't very nervous in the interview i mentioned this in a previous video but this was like my only interview that i had it's not like i had a bunch of other fang interviews at like facebook or apple or microsoft this was the only one so i probably should have been really nervous but i don't know why i just wasn't it just felt like another day of practicing leak code problems making elite code video and stuff like that and so i had five interview rounds that day which is pretty standard for google usually they do one behavioral interview which they call the googliness interview but it's pretty much just a behavioral and they do four coding rounds now i'm not actually going to tell you exactly the questions that they asked me believe it or not i don't think it would actually be that helpful anyway because there's a very little chance you'll get asked the exact same questions and it's not about kind of just memorizing the code and then writing it out you really have to understand what you're doing you really have to communicate with the interviewer the first interview that i had was the googliness and i think that was pretty straightforward there's really not a lot to talk about in that i think i did pretty average it was basically just you know behavioral questions that i think pretty much every company will ask i don't think google does anything unique in that respect the next round was a coding interview round and it's pretty much what everybody talks about it's a data structures and algorithms round where you're given a question and your goal is to find the most optimal solution and hopefully communicate your thought process throughout doing that and i think i did really really well in the first round and i think that kind of gave me the confidence i needed throughout the rest of the interview rounds usually the googliness interview is about 30 minutes but the coding interview rounds are 45 minutes each i think i finished this coding round with all of the follow-ups in about 25 minutes and honestly i did it so quickly that i was even surprised by how well that i did it like there were moments where i got stuck and my brain just went blank and then it felt like the solution automatically just like popped into my head and then i wrote it out i was almost scared that the interviewer was gonna think i was cheating or something but i guess they didn't so after that the interviewer kind of just asked me hey you have any questions for me i asked like one or two questions uh and then we just ended the interview like 20 minutes early so that gave me a little bit of time to get ready for the next round and the second coding round definitely did not go as well as the first this time i actually did need all 45 minutes but part of the difficulty wasn't even my fault in the coding interview rounds there's usually like a shared google doc or something like that that you'll be working on and the interviewer will write out the problem description and you'll be writing out your code you don't really get an ide or anything like that and you definitely don't run your code but the issue was that the interviewer for some reason did not have access to the doc and that wasted about like five minutes of time which was kind of annoying because it wasn't really my fault at all and then when they actually asked me the interview question they had a really thick accent and i just was not able to kind of understand some of the words that they were using the annoying part was that all the other coding interviewers actually wrote out the problem in the google doc but this interviewer was literally just saying it so at this point i was a little bit stuck but then i was like okay maybe i can just write it out myself and if the interviewer is seeing me write it out if i'm misinterpreting the problem maybe they will catch that so that's kind of what i did i either encouraged them to write out exactly what they were saying or i tried to write it out and said is this what you're asking and i think that this is kind of one of the soft skills the communication skills that a lot of people overlook it's not just about taking a coding interview problem writing out the exact solution you're really having to work with your interviewer in some cases your interviewer is not super easy to work with you either can't understand them or it seems like they're not really trying to help you as best as they could but overall i did figure out what they were asking for i got pretty close to the optimal solution in terms of time and space complexity i think i did but i was still doing it in a slightly weird way that the interviewer didn't really understand and i think they got kind of caught up on that because there was a slightly better way that i could be doing this solution i was over complicating it but the time and space complexity still was optimal so i think for the most part this interview round did go well enough for me now the third coding interview round was probably the hardest question of all it was super complicated to even understand what was going on not because of like an accent or anything just the problem itself was just so complicated i came up with a non-optimal solution that i was able to code up but the interviewer was definitely hinting at a better solution and by the end of it and using one or two hints from them i actually did come up with the optimal solution and i can tell you that i would have never came up with it without a hint it was insanely hard it was definitely a leak code hard level question to get the optimal solution and i was able to come up with it but i wasn't able to code it up in time but because it was so difficult i think i still got a good score from the interviewer i don't know for sure but i'm assuming that i did and i was able to come up with a non-optimal solution pretty quickly and the non-optimal one was actually not easy to code up either so this was definitely a difficult problem but i think the interviewer was probably more looking for your thought process which again this is why it's important to be able to explain your thought process because that allows the interviewer to give you a hint and if you can interpret their hint correctly then maybe you can come up with the optimal solution and the last uh interview around which was the fourth coding round was just kind of a weird problem to be honest this was probably the least like a leap code question it technically was still like a leak code question but it was very weird this problem was the most focused on the thought process i think because there wasn't really an easy way to just come up with the solution to the problem it was really more of a discussion just kind of talking about the possible solutions to the problem the possible algorithms we could use what would be better about one versus the other how would you even analyze the time complexity even analyzing that actually was not straightforward for this problem and after this one i honestly had no idea how i did it was just not something i was expecting at all but after that was over you know i thanked the interviewer told them it was a pretty interesting problem and then that was over and honestly i thought i did reasonably well throughout the interview process but after it was said and done i wasn't sure if i was actually gonna pass or not going into it i had high confidence coming out of it i was really 50 50 because i know you don't have to do perfectly but i was even wondering you know were there parts that i did really poorly on it was really hard to judge for me and the waiting process did not make it any easier because i think it was at least a month maybe like six weeks before i actually found out whether i had passed or not but once i had found out i was super relieved and i really couldn't even contain my excitement i was just so happy i was finally not unemployed anymore my journey was finally over and that is basically how i escaped unemployment and got into google it would have been nice if i had a few more interviews lined up but i'm glad i passed the one that i did have anyway so thank you so much for watching if you're preparing for your coding interviews i recommend checking out neetcode.io it's a free resource it's a much better way to prepare for coding interviews you learn patterns rather than just blindly going through random questions every single problem has a detailed video solution and most of them have python and java code solutions i'm planning on adding c plus and javascript in the future so feel free to contribute if you would like but thanks again for watching if you found this helpful please like and subscribe it really supports the channel a lot consider checking out my patreon if you'd like to further support the channel and hopefully i'll see you pretty soon thanks for watching

Channel: NeetCode

Views: 465,704

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Id: T53EyLPj4UM

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022