Interview Experience

Google SWE Grad 2025 | Held from July

Applied through campus.

Round 1: Online coding round

I had two questions for the online coding round; one was a dynamic programming problem (a variation of the longest common subsequence problem, but slightly more difficult) that I solved. I did not manage to solve the other question, and I don't remember what it was.

After one week, I received an email stating that I was shortlisted from the online coding round.

I was invited to a meeting to discuss the interview process. They mentioned that there would be three interview rounds: a DSA round, a DSA + Googliness round, and a third DSA round.

Round 2: DSA round (45 minutes) The interviewer introduced herself and asked for my introduction. I had high-speed internet, but the link she provided took five minutes to load. Approximately 10-12 minutes of my time was already gone before she presented the question.

A connection of cities was given, and I needed to find the farthest distance from all of the input cities. For example: a->h, b->h, h->c.

I asked about constraints and explained my brute-force BFS approach. She asked me to optimize my solution. I thought for a bit and realized it could be solved using Dijkstra's algorithm, performing Dijkstra's algorithm for each input as a single source and using a vector to update values for each input source. She said I was on the right track and asked about the time and space complexity, which I explained.

Next, I had to code. I started coding, but I made the mistake of not asking her for the input format and directly started coding using small characters as an example. She stopped me and said, "Who told you to use small characters? Use strings." Then I started coding again. I was just about to finish the Dijkstra function code when she announced, "Time's up."

Round 3: (DSA + Googliness): If shortlisted from the coding round, I had to attend two interview rounds; the last round would be announced after review from both rounds. (This interviewer was different from the Round 2 interviewer.)

First, she asked me a simple, easy-level hash map question and a follow-up. She was impressed with my answers. Then she asked me a sliding window problem, which was quite tricky. After solving it on pen and paper, I recognized it as a sliding window problem and explained this to her. Then she asked me to write the code, which I did, explaining the space and time complexity. For the Googliness round, she asked me some standard behavioral questions.

Round 3 went well, but because I was unable to finish my code in Round 2, I wasn't shortlisted for the next round. Better luck next time.