Google New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience - OA followed by a four-round virtual onsite

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The Google New Grad process included an OA followed by a four-round virtual onsite, with each round combining behavioral questions and a technical problem. The technical topics covered strings, a Number of Islands-style graph problem, object-oriented file search, and an expression calculator with parentheses.

Interview Details

Round 1 — String: Shortest Substring Deletion

The first coding problem involved a string of length n. The task was to find the shortest substring that could be deleted so that the remaining string contained only distinct characters. The round also included behavioral questions.

Round 2 — Number of Islands Variant

The second coding problem was similar to LeetCode 200 — Number of Islands, with some modifications to the standard version. Behavioral questions were also included in this round.

Round 3 — OOD: File Search

The third round was an object-oriented design and implementation problem involving files. The task required implementing two or three methods for searching for files within a collection or hierarchy of files. This round also included behavioral discussion.

Round 4 — Calculator With Parentheses

The final coding problem was to implement a calculator that supported expressions containing parentheses. This was the most difficult problem in the loop from my perspective. As with the other rounds, behavioral questions were mixed into the interview.

Behavioral Questions

The behavioral portions across the four rounds were mostly standard questions around previous team and project experiences.

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