I got rejected by Google

so I've got some good news and some bad news the bad news is I got rejected by Google the good news is I just saved 15% of my car insurance by switching the Geico all right that part's not true but I do want to share my interview experience for those of you who don't know I did do a video on my Google experience last year it got like 200,000 views by far my most popular video so obviously it's a topic you all are interested in so I decided to make another video on it because I just went through that same process again and you would think that gone through the same interview process with the same company would be very similar but in reality it was completely different there were two phases for this process the initial technical phone screen followed by the final round which is a full day of about four to five interviews with developers now normally for the final round they would bring you on-site to do face-to-face interviews now that we're going through a pandemic this was all done virtually through Google Hangouts now I'm gonna go over the entire process in chronological order from the first point of contact to the last point of contact so grab some popcorn sit back and enjoy the story so initially I was contacted by a recruiter and the funny thing is I didn't even apply for the position they had my email on file from last time and they just sent me a email out of the blue so I set up a meeting with the recruiter for a few days later and she never showed up she said something about her laptop dying and not having the charger but anyways we were able to connect a few days later the recruiter was from Austin Texas which Google has a pretty large presence in but the roles that I could have interviewed for were either Google cloud in Mountain View or Google Ads in Irvine now my goal is to live and work in Irvine so I decided to go with the Google Ads role and this was for a level 4 position and you know what let me actually just show you guys what the difference is so at Google the entry level is l3y it starts at 3 and not 1 I have no idea but entry level or new gradual is l3 and then more of a mid-level position itself 4 which is what I was going for and then once you go to l5 that's more of a senior role so yeah I gave her my availability for the phone interview it was scheduled for about two or three weeks after now I made a two or three week plan of what I was gonna study on each day like day one would be linked list they too would be binary trees etc I think I ended up studying for like two days total and one of those days was live-streaming a Google mock interview on leap code I think for me personally I I just couldn't find the motivation that I had last year last year I was I was putting in work for this interview like eight hour days for several weeks but I think you know one thing was you know just the the poor experience that I had last year kind of just left a sour taste in my mouth and also my priorities this year are a little bit different than they were last year like last year I was unemployed there was a lot more desperation there and I had more time because I wasn't working right now I'm currently working I'm making videos I'm streaming I have other projects that are just you know I didn't want to take a lot of time away from that to study for this interview so I didn't really prepare as much as I should have so I kind of just went into the interview winging it so the day of the interview comes and my interview calls me and sends me a link to a Google Doc to write my code on now if you don't know any type of virtual interview with Google they're gonna send you a Google Doc so you don't get all the stuff you would in like an IDE like code completion or error highlighting so the question I got was given a set of number ranges returned a number that is randomly pick but has an even distribution so every number has an even chance of getting picked this problem initially sounded a lot harder than I thought it would be but once I started to think about it it actually the solution it wasn't too bad so I was able to find an optimal solution the interviewer threw some follow-up questions at me which I was able to answer so overall it went very well I heard back from my recruiter she said I did very well and they want to move me on to the final round but a couple things came up first she said you know just with the pandemic going on they are having a bunch of hiring freezes so the Google ads position was no longer hiring so I had to go for the Google cloud interview which is fine because it's that's still an amazing opportunity also she passed me on to another recruiter which was specifically for Google cloud so we set up a virtual on site for about three weeks later it consisted of four data structures and algorithms problems and one interview on testing my googliness googliness refers to the personality traits that they want Google employees to have but in reality it's just to make sure they're not hiring a jerk so the day of the final interview comes and everything was done via webcam via Google Hangouts and the first interview was the googliness interview so the interviewer was like hey I sent you the Google Doc for the coding interview oh wait actually this is the behavioural one so he didn't seem very prepared but the interview did go well it was really just a bunch of situational questions name a time you had a conflict with the co-worker and how did you resolve it name a time where you saw a co-worker struggling and what you did to help them really just questions like that eventually after a while I like was hard to keep thinking of examples of this but but yeah I mean overall went well and my recruiter let me know that I did pass that part of the interview so I'm not a jerk the second interview or the first technical one also when I'll write it was a problem revolving around being given three objects with several traits and you had to return a true or false based on whether some certain requirements were met I did end up finding the right solution but it did take me quite a while so I think that I lost some points on that and then there was a follow-up problem basically it was the same thing but now you're given a million objects instead of three and I didn't have to write code for it but we had to talk about it and Google loves doing this as a follow-up question they love asking stuff about like you know what if the input size is really large so they really like to see how you can scale your problem the third interview was very straightforward it was simply given four points on a graph determined whether it is a rectangle or not this one went all rights I did run out of time before I could finished writing all my code but the interviewer said he was generally happy with the solution so the fourth interview was actually two questions the first question was a pretty trivial question revolving around binary trees it probably took me like five minutes to code up the entire solution the second interview was a very open-ended question about implementing a notification system this was the interview that I probably struggled with the most and the interviewer was pretty much silent the whole time so I didn't get a lot of help there but you know it is what it is the fifth and final interview was probably the best interview and the best interviewer that I had of the day he was very engaged with the problem and I can tell he was just generally excited about solving problems and he also said he enjoyed working with me so there's that this problem was very similar to the rectangle question it was basically like a user is giving you points and you have to basically check if those points form a square and you have to check that on every entry that the user gives but yeah overall I felt like that interview was probably the strongest one of the day so yeah overall I don't think I bombed any of the interviews but I also know that I wasn't that impressive either so kind of like in my gut I knew that I probably wasn't gonna get an offer after the interview though my recruiter completely went dark on me I didn't hear from them for weeks you know despite emailing them I eventually contacted my initial recruiter and then finally got ahold of them only to find out that I did not actually I got a rejection I didn't get an offer they said that sometimes if you did you know pretty good but not well enough to get an offer they'll sometimes give you an offer for the l-3 position but currently they don't have any openings for that I did get a text message a couple weeks later from my recruiter saying you know hey do you have time to talk and in my mind I was like oh maybe maybe something came up so I responded saying yeah I'm available for a call whenever but never heard back so in my mind it's kind of done and I'm also just kind of over it as well so yeah overall it wasn't the best experience I do prefer interviewing a person just because it's it's more personable I feel like I perform better in person you know you have like a whiteboard and it's just better in every way so you know last year it was a poor experience this year was not the best experience so would I and would I interview at Google again probably would I ever apply again probably not and and like I said my priorities have kind of changed when I got into software development I thought working for a company like Google would be the end-all I would stay there until I retired and honestly I feel like it's a little overrated now I know I know a lot of people will not like me saying that but in reality the average time someone works at Google is like three years because what'swhat's the hype of working there anyways yeah I mean it's a great company to work for but you know what you're gonna be working on is very specialized or some people work there for the perks like oh it's a really cool campus well yeah it is but honestly I'd rather work from home than commute an hour each way no matter where I'm going or like oh we get free snacks well I mean I honestly couldn't afford my own snacks if I need to and just as humans we get used to things very fast you know think of like when you get a new iPhone like at first you're like you're very excited you don't want to get it dirty or anything like that and then after like a year or two you don't even care about anymore and you want like the next phone so yeah probably for me I won't apply again however if they do reach out to me I would definitely be open to the opportunity but I would be treating it pretty much just as an any other company so yeah that was my interview experience with Google if you're watching this because you have an interview coming up then I wish you the best of luck I hope you crush it but yeah that's all I wanted to go over in this video if you guys did get value out of it please you know hit that like button and subscribe to the channel and as always keep on coding [Music]

Channel: Keep On Coding

Views: 177,899

Rating: 4.9414487 out of 5

Keywords: google interview, google interview questions, google interview process, coding interview, programming interview, software engineer interview, software engineer, coding interview questions, software interview questions, technical phone interview

Id: bvK-Li6tAEo

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020