Blog: Google Interview

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Google Interview - Monday, October 18, 2010
I had my on-site interview at Google today, and one word to sum it up would be "challenging". I studied plenty, but many of the things I studied weren't brought up during the interview. I didn't feel like the interview questions were particularly hard, but rather that some of them focused on areas in which I had limited experience, such as distributed computing and DBMS deadlock detection.

I didn't get any off-the-wall questions like about dropping eggs from a building or filling a bus with golf balls. All the questions I got were technical and relevant to real-world engineering.

I did alright with the coding questions, though I probably took a little longer to think of my solution than the interviewers would've liked. I made it clear when I wasn't familiar with the answer to something but tried to demonstrate my thought process. In general I arrived at the right answers, but often not without making small mistakes or getting some form of help from the interviewers.

Overall, I enjoyed the time of sharing ideas with my interviewers and learning new things. I did my best, and I'm grateful that prepping for the interview forced me to brush up on a lot of CS and C++ concepts. And whatever the hiring decision comes to, I'll still have a job either way!