How I Landed a Job at Google | Software Engineer Q&A

[Music] hey everyone i'm john your friend in tech if you're new to my channel i'm a software engineer at google based in the bay area so my last video went viral and so i've been getting a lot of the same questions in my comments and on my instagram so in today's video i'm going to be answering the questions i get asked the most my goal for this video is to help you out answer your questions and also gauge interest on what kind of videos i should make next so if there's anything you want me to answer or expand on let me know down in the comments otherwise let's get started so my first question is did you go to school to learn software development or did you go to a boot camp or did you teach yourself so i actually learned how to code in college i went to a california state university and i have my bachelor's and master's in computer science do you need a degree to work at google i get a lot of questions from people asking me what they should major in what kind of certifications they need and what degree google is looking for if you look at the job application for a software engineer at google there's actually no degree requirement so it doesn't really matter how you learn to code you just need the skills to work at google is it easier to get into fang if you go to a good college if you don't know fang stands for facebook amazon apple netflix and google and these are the big tech companies and a lot of people use fang to include all the tech companies so like microsoft square my answer to this is not necessarily some colleges may have more connections with companies than others which means that you know they can invite the companies onto campus to do tech talks and to go to the career fair and this makes it easier for students to network with people from these companies but you don't have to go to a good college quote-unquote good college to get into fame you actually don't even have to go to college so what should i do to get hired at google so number one you need to know how to code so go to college go to a boot camp or teach yourself number two is you need to practice for your technical interviews if you can't pass the interviews then you're not gonna get hired and the interviewing environment is kind of stressful because you're just two people in a room or on a video call and you have to solve a problem in front of somebody you have to explain your thought process but the good thing is that you can get better as you practice over time so that's why i highly recommend practicing mock interviews if you can find someone to do it with and number three you have to apply i know a lot of people stop here because they think it's too hard or they don't feel confident in themselves to apply but if you don't apply the answer is always going to be no so the good thing about applying even if you're not ready is to get a lot of experience about the whole interview process because you hear that you know the interviews are all day and they're hard but you don't really know what that means until you've gone through it yourself so go through the interviews and even if you don't pass you'll still have all those lessons you learned and so when you apply next time you'll have a better chance of getting in does a google referral actually help you get a job i would say yes and no because getting an interview can help you get your foot in the door but it doesn't mean that you'll pass your interviews and it doesn't mean that you'll get hired but don't be discouraged if you don't have a referral to google you don't need one to get hired for example i didn't have a referral and i just applied online on the website and then a couple of days later i got contacted by a recruiter what is the best coding language to program in for a google interview so at google and a lot of these tech companies you can choose which language you're gonna interview in and so i recommend interviewing in your strongest language or whatever language you're the most comfortable in so for example when i did my interviews i was still in college and a lot of my courses were in java so i took my interviews in java how can i improve my coding skills so the best way is through practice practice makes progress so you can do legal problems you can work on a personal project if you can get an internship or a job that's even better because you'll learn a lot through experience does google have any internship programs for first and second year students so google has a software engineering internship that's open to all students and they also have a step internship and step stands for student training and engineering program it's for first and second year undergraduate students who have a passion for computer science and this program has a focus on providing opportunities to students from groups who are historically underrepresented in tech both of these internships are really great i was part of both of them and i highly recommend it how was your internship at google so i mentioned in a previous video that i interned at google three times my first internship was the step internship and i was in boston on a google flights team building an internal website my second internship i was a software engineer intern in mountain view which is google's headquarters and i was working on the android ui toolkit team and i was building an accessibility tool to help make apps more accessible at my third internship i was a software engineer intern and i was based in new york city which is really fun i worked on an android app for googlers what was your interview experience like at google so google is known for having these all day technical interviews where you're there solving back-to-back coding problems i fortunately did not have to do that so i actually only ever interviewed at google as a sophomore in college and so my experience is a lot different than normal so my first round of interviews was for the step internship and it was two 45-minute phone interviews and it focused on data structures and algorithms at the end of my step internship i actually interviewed again so i can convert to be a software engineer intern and it was one 45-minute in-person interview where i coded on a whiteboard and it focused again on data structures and algorithms and then at the end of my last internship in new york city i actually expected to interview to convert to full-time because that was the normal process and they decided to give me a full-time offer based on my feedback from my performance evaluations of my internship so because i did so well in my internship they just gave me a full-time offer without having to interview which was really great how many times did it take you to pass your google interviews so when i first started interviewing i had no idea what i was doing and i really fumbled through the interview experience so i failed interviews from companies like apple from amazon from microsoft but i learned from each of those experiences and i got better through practice so by the time i got to my google interviews i actually felt super comfortable and i passed all of them on my first try so the lesson here is to keep on trying what questions do you ask as a google interviewer so this is a funny question that i actually got a couple times and i do conduct interviews but i can't tell you what i ask for many reasons and i don't think it'll help anyways because there's no guarantee that you'll get asked the same thing i think it's better to focus on your problem solving skills so that you can answer any question that comes your way and then another comment i always get is can we connect on linkedin and my answer is no but if you do want to connect with me add me on instagram at your friend in tech i'd be happy to connect with you on there so that's all the questions for this video if you have anything else you want to know leave a comment down below if you haven't seen my last video where i go to the google office be sure to check that out and my next video is going to be another day in the life vlog so subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: 🌟 Jon - Your Friend In Tech

Views: 24,779

Keywords: how I learned to code, google software engineer, how to get into google, how to learn how to code, software engineer, google interviews, google internship, step internship, software engineer internship, swe internship, swe interview, passing the coding interview, google referral, learn how to code, day in the life of a software engineer, how i got a job at google, software engineer question and answer, learn to code, how to learn to code, how i learned to code for google

Id: r43rZ0zxdlc

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021