These are the edited notes that I kept while preparing for the Google software engineer interview (a.k.a the LeetCode style loop with a hiring committee at the end). I went through the whole circuit - phone screen, coding rounds, system design, behavioral - so the notes cover the process itself too, not just the questions.
Google interviews have a mixed attitude - some people defend the process; some people hate it. My strategy was pretty straightforward - you can whine about the process being a lottery, or you can push yourself and learn how the machine works instead.
The thing that separates Google from a normal interview - my recruiter told me on our very first call that you get three attempts in five years, after that they stop accepting. Three attempts for an entire career. A former colleague went quiet for about five seconds when I told him that, and I read his silence as "do not screw this up."
I broke my notes into a few parts:
- Phone screen
- Coding
- System design
- Googleyness and Leadership
- The hiring committee
- Mock interviews (and the tooling I used)
- Team matching
Phone screen
Google does the phone screen in a shared Google Doc. Not an IDE - a plain text document, no syntax highlighting, no autocomplete. You write real code in there for forty five minutes while somebody watches you type. I got a sliding window question and a binary search variant, both medium.
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Try InterviewMan FreeWhen I'm doing normal programming, I experiment a lot and fix things as I go. It doesn't work if you have forty five minutes, a plain Google Doc and pair of eyes watching you type. I wish somebody had told me about the Doc before the screen.
A process detail that I learned later - if the screener is on the fence, they give you a second phone screen instead of rejecting. I know two people this happened to (one from a coding bootcamp Discord), and both got through on the second one.
Coding
I ground through 200 LeetCode problems before the loop. It helped less than it should have, and not because the problems were too hard.
The hardest part with Google questions is seeing the actual question. Google interviewers pack their problems with extra context and red herrings on purpose. My former colleague warned me about exactly this, and I didn't listen. There was one situation when I jumped on a pattern only to realize eight minutes into solving the problem that I was solving a different problem and need to go back to the start.
The question sounded exactly like a sliding window problem I had practiced the night before. It was not. The interviewer sat there in total silence for the whole eight minutes, watching. I called my colleague from the parking lot after and he just said yeah, I told you.
My take away:
- Think out loud every second
- Practice combination problems
- Do not trust pattern matching from the night before
The think out loud part I can't stress enough. The committee reads what the interviewer wrote, and the interviewer writes what you said. I stayed quiet through a graph problem and the feedback said unclear reasoning. I knew what I was doing, nobody else did, because I didn't say it. My colleague read that packet later and told me: you solved it, they wrote you up like you were guessing.
On combination problems - Google gave me graph with dynamic programming in one round and tree with hashmap in another. Pure binary search or pure BFS almost never shows up alone. Five hundred isolated mediums are less useful than fifty combination problems. I wasted three weekends grinding individual topics before I figured this out.
System design
System design is one round, and the whole round can hang on one design choice. My prep coach calls it the linchpin insight. It sounded dramatic to me, he was right though. Mine was cache invalidation for a distributed system, and I came within thirty seconds of not seeing it. Miss it and the conversation never leaves the diagram level, and one of three attempts goes for nothing.
Googleyness and Leadership
Googleyness and Leadership sounds mysterious, in practice it's a behavioral interview about team conflicts and project failures and ownership stories. An interviewer told me that some committee members barely read this section of the packet. Prepare it anyway - you don't get to choose your committee.
The hiring committee
Interviewing at Google is a lottery (the committee makes sure of that). Four or five engineers who never met me decided my fate based on packets from the people who interviewed me. Strangers reading other strangers' notes about me. My colleague knew someone who went through Google twice with different committee members each time - completely different outcomes on basically the same performance.
Mock interviews
Mock interviews help with the process trivia more than any list of questions. I used my former colleague as interviewer and we ran full rounds over Google Meet.
I cheated here - I work on InterviewMan, so I ran our tool during the mocks the same way a real candidate would. It picks up the problem through audio and puts approach suggestions on an overlay that only you can see. My colleague spent five minutes trying to find it - shared screen, my dock, a recording of the session - and saw nothing.
During the mock Googleyness round it pulled a conflict story out of the conversation that I had completely forgotten about, the same kind of story the committee supposedly barely reads but still needs to be in the packet. During the mock system design it flagged a caching insight that turned out to be the linchpin for that question.
On the tooling in general - coding-only tools like Interview Coder cost two ninety nine a month. They cover three of the five rounds and leave you alone for system design and behavioral. InterviewMan covers all five at twelve bucks a month on the annual plan. Three months of prep cost me thirty six dollars - less than one week of Interview Coder. We're at fifty seven thousand users with twenty plus stealth features, and as far as I can tell nobody has been caught.
Team matching
The committee saying yes is not an offer. After it comes team matching, where both you and the hiring manager have to agree, and your approval stays good for about a year. So there's no rush. The best and a bit counter-intuitive advice I got through this whole thing - wait for a team you actually want to wake up for.
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