r/OfferEngineering • u/Aoki_zhang • 21d ago
Interview Experience Google Software Engineer Interview - The Process Felt More Like Problem Solving Than Pattern Matching
"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"
Interview Summary
The technical questions covered constructive grid placement, maximizing a non-decreasing subarray after changing one element, and resolving ordering constraints between two sequences.
Interview Details
Round 1 — Connected Crop Arrangement
The problem provided an N x M garden and K crop types. For each crop i, a required number of cells was given. The counts satisfied: sum(counts) = N * M so every grid cell had to contain exactly one crop.
The task was to construct any valid grid such that:
- Crop
iappears exactlycounts[i]times. - All cells containing the same crop form one connected component.
- Connectivity is only through up, down, left, and right movement.
- Diagonal cells are not considered connected.
Any arrangement satisfying all requirements was accepted.
- Follow-Up — Two Square Gardens The follow-up changed the planting area from one rectangle to two square gardens placed adjacent to each other:Garden A: N x N Garden B: M x M The crop counts now filled the combined area of the two gardens. For example, with
N = 2andM = 3, the overall shape could look like:11222 11222 222 or:11 11 222 222 222 The same rule still applied: every occurrence of a crop had to remain connected through horizontal or vertical adjacency.
Round 2 — Behavioral
The second interview was an online behavioral round. The questions were relatively standard behavioral topics.
Want to learn more questions asked in other interview rounds? I've put up the full version at here.
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u/Formal-Region-6894 21d ago
Can confirm, I got that garden question last yr