Google Interview Experience 2022 | Google Interview Process | GeeksforGeeks

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi everyone i hope you all are doing great i am mishika khandelwal from geeksforgeeks and your host for today and we are back with another interview series and today with us we have utkarsh which is upcoming swe at google so let's welcome akash yeah hi kash how are you hi everyone and hi mishika i'm doing great how about you i'm also doing great first of all kash congratulations to google for landing a dream job which many of us see so for congratulations for google thank you so much and thank you so much for inviting me over here yeah so utkash i have gone through your profile and i have a few questions to ask you about your previous experience and how you prepare for the google so uh akash like could you please give us a brief about your experience yeah sure uh so hi everyone i am utkarsh nigam and uh i am a csc undergrad at punjab engineering college in chattanooga and uh i have interned at microsoft for six months last year and received a ppo from them and this year i have received two offers from uh two off-campus offers from amazon berlin and google london and i'll be joining google london in august and uh besides i think i have to travel and eat and the experience i'll be sharing uh moving forward in this uh series okay so congratulations for like uh having both the ladles in your hand one with amazon and another with the google so congratulations for that yeah thank you so much yeah so moving forward okay so like what was your preparation strategy like what route you follow to crack the exam and prepare for the interview uh okay so the preparation strategy it depends on which stage you are on like if you're just starting out i would suggest uh going depth wise in all the topics uh understanding different topics and practicing uh different different types of questions in those topics and uh using sites like geeksforgeeks lead code and interview bit to get a depth wise uh like depth wise uh understanding of these topics but once you have like you have been shortlisted and have an upcoming interviews uh you should focus on company tagged questions and uh then move forward with those and try to cover as many topics as you can in the short time span like you have about two weeks to one month to prepare for interviews once you have been shortlisted in off-campus office so for the utilize that time and try to cover the breadth of questions that you can that are company tag because uh some of the times if in case of google you won't get exactly the same question but it will be on uh similar lines like the difficulty level and at least the logic uh might be uh similar to the ones that have already been asked okay so and so since you mentioned like it was a off-campus uh hiring i believe you know you you applied off-campus so uh you know while applying for off-campus uh your resume is the first thing that a people see so what is the importance of resume building and how was your resume uh was different from others uh so for resume like that is very important uh for getting your shortlisted specifically uh for international offers because uh they don't know about your college or there is nothing like tier one tier 2 at that point so it's mostly about the resume i personally used novo resume for building my resume and like you can find many tips online using like there are harvard tips for making a resume and all those things my personal suggestion would be utilizing action keywords when you're writing your work experience uh words like developed built and writing about the tech stack you used in those features or whatever you built in your internship and secondly when you're writing about your project don't write it in a general way that the team did this or did that write your individual contributions in those so that uh because uh when you will be interviewing the uh the interviewer would be looking through a resume and would be talking about those uh data points as well so you have to keep those in mind okay so you should mention your individual responsibilities what you have done and what was your role in that particular project like we have to emphasize on our role rather than like yeah rather than working in a team yeah so like you can write one line about what the exact project is and what all features it had but after that like what did you do exactly like you focus on the back end or you developed any kind of feature or in the front end you were part of so write those uh highlight your contribution in the project as well okay and uh how many rounds were there um at google like how many rounds you have gone through okay so i applied on the portal after that i had one uh recruiter call after that uh one phone interview that was uh over the phone i like they shared a document and uh the interviewer was on the phone next i had five virtual on-sites with out of which four were technical and one was uh for the googliness and managerial round okay and uh what kind of questions you were asked in the technical round uh so the technical round is purely based on data structures and algorithms they don't even waste time on your introduction or anything like and i would suggest that it's for the best because they are very strict on their 45 minutes interview policy and they won't extend it and you have to solve like uh minimum two questions and sometimes they can be follow-ups uh so it can be like three variations of same questions so you have to manage your time very uh like you have to be very careful about the time limit and uh quickly think quickly on your feet in that in during these interviews at google okay and uh what was the most difficult and overwhelming part of the journey and how did you overcome it uh the most overwhelming part i think is applying for the jobs and because most of us are underconfident about uh getting these offers and specifically when you are applying internationally you are always in self-doubt that whether or not you will get shortlisted but i would say just go for it and in the worst case you'll just get rejected and that's not the end of it you can you can still apply for different different job companies and all those things so just apply and see what happens and uh if you if you have prepared i think it's not a big deal cracking into these companies and now with the plethora of resources that are available to us it has become very easy uh compared to before so definitely utilize the resources and prepare your best and then i think uh it just when you have received a short list you can easily make it happen yeah so it's just like worst we can get a no but at least we have our experience and yeah and some of the times you are even able to get feedback from the recruiters or like uh you're able to understand why they have uh rejected you at least like in phone screen or something if you are not getting through you they'll uh tell you about them the mistakes you made or how you could do better so sometimes that's the case not with every company but google i think does provide some kind of feedback regarding the on-site interviews and all those things okay so they do provide feedback as well so like while interviewing they provide or like after the interview they provide through any uh media yeah so sometimes after the interviews like uh for virtual onsite they will provide you with some feedback and uh mostly like they might even give you another chance like one of my friends uh received another chance to interview again uh like one interview was repeated for him so it's not like you have to do exceptionally well in all the interviews if if some interviews goes bad so you can still uh prepare like you can still focus on the other ones and you might have you might get through okay so uh what is the importance of dsa since you mentioned they don't waste a any any second and they strictly jump on to the dsa so how important dsa is and in what depth we must have the knowledge of dsc tsa is very crucial for at least for google interviews i think uh the four interviews and the phone screen round itself were totally based on dsa you will get one question and then follow-ups like i had uh in all my rounds i had one started with one question and then uh two follow-ups for that and you have to quote each and every uh like once they have given you follow-up you just uh you have to quote that again from scratch so uh they need all the uh like all the programming that you have done or coding uh code you have written in that form or uh to dock they share so that is very important and uh dsa for software engineering roles is like uh the holy grail you can't uh skip it you have to go into depth of all the topics uh and you can't miss leave out anything like you might think uh that you are very good with binary search but you should know uh which all questions you can solve with those because there might be a question an approach that utilizes binary search but you don't know about it and you might get uh like if you put a lot of time in question but that's the point you don't have a lot of time uh during the interviews so once you get like uh if the interviewer has given you a hint or something you have to quickly think on your feet and this can only come with practice like if you have done a wide area of questions uh for the topics you will be able to easily uh grasp on these hints and uh quickly come up with the solution okay so any any specific topics you would like to suggest people like you have the good knowledge or handsome practice on those particular topics of dsa you have you know you have on tips or in the whole dsc like well any any specific topic or the whole dac you should be on your tips so you have to practice the entire uh ds like all the topics in the dsc you can't skip anything because you don't know what the interviewer might ask like in my interviews i had questions on priority q bind research uh greedy algorithms uh dynamic programming and graph as well so you have you can't skip any topic as such and uh the questions uh are also like they want you to think through these problems and for that like you need to have some background knowledge on all of these topics and you can't just skip it i like in one of the questions i started with a priority queue and ended up solving it with like the final optimal solution was uh using a binary search so you can't uh think uh that you can skip one of the algorithms or one of the uh data structure and you can't uh and you can just get through with that okay so how was your overall personal experience while entering with google so how was it uh actually it was quite great they facilitated like they fast tracked the process because i had an offer from amazon so i had to reply to them as well so uh the recruiter was uh amazing in terms of uh the smooth onboarding and alex conducting the interview process very smoothly and also in terms of the interviewers they were very helpful and they were given like if you are stuck you don't you shouldn't panic at that moment and listen uh for the cues from the interviewer and understand the hints if they give you and uh most of the time they will give you an hint and will direct you in the right direction so always listen to them and uh overall the experience was uh literally like uh quite great at google okay so did they give any assignment or it was a on-site like questionnaire like you have to solve the problems live yeah so it was a live uh coding solution like uh as in interviews that happened for ds around so you uh the interviewer will paste a question or read it out for you and then you have to write the code for those first you discuss your approach and uh like what you're thinking about then and then you have to once you have made your case like what approach you're thinking and if that that is the right one you proceed with the coding in the shared document so google has the internal tool which basically is a document is a document a code writer or something you can say which uh even highlights for different languages but you don't have features like auto completion and all those things okay and which websites or blogs you you follow or you prefer for finding job opportunities like any website you would like to recommend or mention for the job seekers okay for the job seekers uh like you should definitely rely on linkedin they uh like over there you you will always find job openings and uh other than that like if you have some targeted companies in your mind go and check their careers portal for new grads uh do use the uh like the keyword new grad and you will be able to find the job openings for new grads specifically because most of the time other job openings require experience and you might get rejected straight away without uh for not having that much exp work experience so try to find out new grad opportunities and just apply to them besides that for preparation as i already mentioned uh lead code interview bit uh geeksforgeeks and all all these websites are already available and have uh an ample amount of resources to help you prepare for the interviews okay and uh what kind of projects uh did you work on like do you think like working on projects before will help you prepare for these uh top notch companies or they'll help you you know getting selected in these companies yeah uh so uh basically in google specifically the googliness round is totally based off on your resume so you will be talking about all the personal projects that you have done your individual contributions and various uh social situations that there is like if you had a problem with your team or uh had a difference of opinion with the team within the team so those kind of questions will only you will only be able to answer if you have done the projects and they do go in depth in those projects and also with your internship experience like whatever you have written they will question you about the decisions you have made and uh google only one round is there for this but when you're talking about amazon they focus very heavily on leadership principles and almost all my interviews had like dedicated 15 to 20 minutes on my uh projects and different questions to bring out the leadership principles okay great and uh so uh what is the most interesting part of the job you like the most uh so i actually get to begin my job with google so uh like uh the best part i think uh for me software engineering has been uh one of the best jobs that i wanted to do elections uh school years so that is uh quite rewarding to get into such top-notch companies that uh basically provide software for different aspects of our lives and make them easier and apart from that in this job i also get to travel to london and uh possibly around europe so that is also quite interesting yeah that's that's great and uh i would like to ask one more thing to like what motivates you yeah like while preparing all those things and you know like what what keeps you what what is the thing that keeps you motivated yeah you know throughout the whole the process throughout the whole process yeah so uh i think google has been has been a personal goal and uh also a dream company since starting off my college so you could say like uh getting into that company was uh like one of the important uh part like important goals for me that's why i really i was really motivated to work for it so i had my own uh doubts and suspicions when i was applying for the job i did not think that i would be shortlisted but luckily i did and uh i i took the chance and i was uh able to get through that yeah that's great great to hear that and um any any advice you would like to give or give the audience or viewers who are preparing for the top notch companies any advice you would like to give so my advice would be like give you a hundred percent and uh failure is not the end you could definitely you will have many chances and uh just keep on giving your best you should not end up with a regret that you did not give a hundred percent for any of the uh applications that you sent out or uh any of the interviews that you had so just uh give your hundred percent for all the opportunities that you get yeah that's good and uh again akash uh congratulations for you know tracking the interview in google and so um this is all done from my end and thank you so much for interacting it was a great interacting to you and thank you so much for being with us today and answer to all our queries yeah thank you so much for inviting me and thank you so much for the wishes and uh it's been a great uh interaction with you as well thank you thank you thank you thank you so much everyone for joining us today and stay tuned for more updates with geeksforgeeks