I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2013
Interview
Contacted via linkedin. Phone interview scheduled, then onsite the next week.
Questions:
Phone interview
1. You want to provide internet access to 90% of the population of Africa - How would you do it?
2. You want to design a phone for deaf people - how do you do it?
Onsite:
5 interviews + lunch.
5 Interviews - 3 PMs, 1 Director, 1 Engineer
PMs + Director - Design/thinking areas probed.
1. Design an alarm clock.
2. 100 floors in a building - 3 main occupants - top 10 floors (company 1), next 90 floors evenly split, top 45 company2, bottom 45, company 3. Design the elevator system.
3. 8% drop in hits to Google.com. Larry Page walks into your office asks you to think about what the reasons might be. Enumerate.
4. Tell me about the most difficult interaction you had at work.
5. Name a non-Google product you've recently used - what do you think of it, how could it be improved. What if a feature you designed and managed is deemed to have poor ROI - defend it and the analysis of the data that is presented to you.
6. How many reviews are written in a month on yelp.com. You have no data and no access to any data. Estimate.
7. Design a car for blind people. Enumerate the use cases. Prioritize them. Justify everything with sound logic.
Engineer:
Design a simple load balancer for google.com. What data structures would you use? Why? Define access/delete/add complexity (Order of) for each data structure and explain your choices. Design an algorithm to add/delete nodes to/from the data structure. How would you pick which server to send a request to? Why? Why not?
Design the Google search service - essential pieces, logic, discuss why/why not/tradeoffs.
Lunch: Very friendly PM, had joined Google 2 months earlier. Had 10+ years experience.
Overall a pleasant and challenging experience. Was told by recruiter that they'd be in touch within a few days. Waiting to hear back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
4. Tell me about the most difficult interaction you had at work.
The process was straightforward and moved quickly. After applying online, a recruiter reached out within a few days for a brief phone screen. That was followed by two video interviews, one with the hiring manager and one with a panel of team members focused on project planning and stakeholder communication. The whole thing wrapped up in about two weeks, and the team was responsive and clear about next steps throughout.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I walked through a specific project where a key vendor delivery slipped. I explained how I flagged the risk early in our weekly status review, reset expectations with stakeholders, re-sequenced dependent tasks, and brought the timeline back within an acceptable range by negotiating a partial early delivery.
standard 1st round digital interview, they are asking about your experience, background, some behavioural questions and technical questions. and they also share a bit more about the role, culture and expectation
Very self-driven, first of multiple rounds, where I had to take the initiative to arrive at the problem, constraints, approach, solutions, tradeoffs and reasoning behind it in a matter of 30 minutes.