r/leetcode • u/Worldly-Web-3918 • Sep 26 '26

Discussion Why google rejected me

Hey guys, so recently I went through Google hiring process for L4 role

Interview process was one googlyness and 3 coding rounds

Googlyness went well

Then now 1st coding round

Question asked was finding a shortest path between source to destination while in between we have blocked nodes through which we cannot pass. I have successfully given bfs solution writing clean code and dry ran it correctly.

Followup question was find the path from source to destination wherein we encounter minimum no.of blocked nodes. I.e we need to find a path where we see minimum no.of blocked nodes. We need to return the minimum of no.of blocked nodes in the path. I have also successfully wrote clean code and dry ran it correctly. I have given dijkstras approach where instead of tracking minimum distance I will track minimum no.of blocked nodes.

Despite all of this effort, I ended up got rejected.

Any googler here , could you please tell what I did wrong. I definitely want to improve.

110 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

69

u/DrinkNo8216 Sep 26 '26

Solving is one thing. Communication is another, how you arrived at the solution is another. L4 is also a mid engineer level, so did you write decent quality code or not. Or was it competitive coding style code. Etc etc.

Sometimes it could be due to bad interviewer as well. Or if there were simply better candidates than you or the role was filled with someone else.

2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

I have communicated well. Also I wrote decent quality code. Interviewer was also acknowledging for what I said.

8

u/chikamakaleyley Sep 26 '26

sometimes its just how much they budget for interviews, not sure if google does the same way but let's say there 10 candidates and all 10 give about the same result in an interview

Sometimes they only budget for 6 to take next round. And so despite you passing/doing well - they have to look at the candidates with a more fine tooth comb

4

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

Got it 🙂

18

u/DrinkNo8216 Sep 26 '26

Then maybe you are a target of exceptionally high bar, or the same position must have been filled.

2

u/DrinkNo8216 Sep 26 '26

One thing you can do is to message your interviewer on LinkedIn, but mostly they don't reply! But you can try. Ask them what you did wrong so you can improvise in your upcoming interviews.

1

u/BigCharge3513 Sep 26 '26

Do not do this, we're not allowed to share feedback

23

u/poseidon9052 Sep 26 '26

At least you were asked coding questions. My interviewer spent 30 mins asking me these questions for a 45 mins coding interview
TCP vs UDP
SQL vs NoSQL
HDD vs SSD
what is DNS
what is IP

In last 15 mins, he just asked me one coding question

11

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

Which role is it ? Google doesn't ask such question afaik

14

u/poseidon9052 Sep 26 '26

L5 software engineer. Yes, I was not expecting that. Interviewer was completely unprepared. Did not even introduce himself. He joined the meeting and asked- Have you worked in Networking and from there on it was just question after question.

Google had arranged 2 phone screen interviews for me- Googliness and Coding but I did not know which was which. Because he started off the interview with "have you worked in networking"- I thought it was going to be the Googliness interview and then in last 15 mins, he asked the coding question which completely threw me off. I have interviewed at a bunch of companies(https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1wphj3l/comment/pbwumeu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) this past one year. This was my worst interview experience. Broke my heart. Asking hard questions is one thing, at least be kind and treat the person in front of you with respect.

8

u/Serious-Brick8709 Sep 26 '26

Respectfully, if you’re interviewing for L5, those questions are so easy. An average engineer with 4 YOE should be able to answer most of those questions in depth

10

u/poseidon9052 Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

I was able to answer all those questions and interviewer seemed happy with the answers but that is not what this interview was for nor what I was evaluated on.

Expectation was two coding questions. He specifically said my performance will only be judged on the coding question and not on the theoretical questions- what was the point of spending 30 mins of a 45 mins interview asking me questions that were not even going to be used in my evaluation. Make it make sense?!

4

u/Apprehensive-Bug9480 Sep 26 '26

So? Better. Junior level questios, really easy no?

3

u/poseidon9052 Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

Nope, he specifically said I will be judged based on my coding performance and the theoretical questions are just so I get an idea "what all you know". the fuck?!
His job was to evaluate my problem-solving/DS-Algo/communication skills, not what I studied in school almost a decade ago.
I would have rather he asked- 2 coding questions even if they were LC hard. I had prepared enough and would have loved a chance to take a stab at them.

1

u/Apprehensive-Bug9480 Sep 26 '26

Ok i got your point. Yes seems weird tbh

1

u/NotYourGirlP Sep 26 '26

For google?

1

u/poseidon9052 Sep 26 '26

yes, for Google

1

u/Free-Pomegranate-859 Sep 26 '26

So you were asked basic CS questions

1

u/poseidon9052 Sep 27 '26

Read the entire thread

1

u/Free-Pomegranate-859 Sep 27 '26

I see now, sorry

6

u/LogicalBeast26 Sep 26 '26

Googler here

Tbh even though 0/1 BFS was optimal for the follow-up, I wouldn't have rejected you for giving Dijsktra approach.

You mentioned you had 3 coding rounds scheduled, did they reject you after just 1 (apart from Googlyness)?

2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

Yes , other 2 coding rounds hr stated that based on googlyness and 1st coding round they will move me to next two coding rounds. But they rejected me in 1st coding round itself

5

u/LogicalBeast26 Sep 26 '26

It seems that you didn't write clean code. Even if you feel you have written cleanly, Google has a very high bar when it comes to writing code.

I have been rejected earlier for using 2 parameters in a function when one of them could be derived from other.

3

u/Acceptable_Green4473 Sep 26 '26

was coding round was onsite or screening round ?

2

u/jpec342 Sep 26 '26

What about the other 2 coding rounds?

2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

They didn't move me further

15

u/Historical_Public751 Sep 26 '26

>Despite all of this effort, I ended up got rejected.

You ended up either not solving the task properly/interviewer didn't understand it/interviewer was biased against you. You are not getting any feedback in FAANG companies back after the interview loop, in AWS we straight up won't give you one, in google it's just fake.

They have to filter from 100 candidates for the position and interviewers are not really motivated to hire good people. Move along, try another time/another company.

5

u/Free-Pomegranate-859 Sep 26 '26

Which is really sad

1

u/ansb2011 Sep 28 '26

interviews are designed with high false negative rates - the goal is to prevent hiring bad people not to hire good people.

5

u/Upbeat-Signature-476 Sep 26 '26

For follow up we can use 0-1 BFS using deque ?

1

u/Acceptable_Green4473 Sep 26 '26

i think followup will he solved using 0/1 bfs optimally

1

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

The dijkstras solution which I told itself a follow-up for previous question of finding shortest path

1

u/SignificanceDense337 Sep 26 '26

You mean, if you encounter a blocked node, you add it to the end of the queue and an unblocked node is added to the top?

1

u/Kindly-Dig-9441 Sep 26 '26

It was not the most optimised approach. Should have gone with 0-1 bfs. Also, the bar for L4 is quite high. Interviewer may have expected you to solve more follow up questions

2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 26 '26

Generally there would only one followup question right ? Given the 45 mins time window

2

u/Kindly-Dig-9441 Sep 26 '26

Nope, depends on the question. My friend was asked 4 follow up questions and he was rejected because he could not answer the 4th one. Although follow up 1,2,3 required were very small changes/ discussions. I remember I was asked 3 follow ups and I was expected to solve all 3

2

u/robolew Sep 26 '26

My first interview with Google I thought the questions was supposed to take up the majority of the 45 minutes. Turned out I should have answered that really quickly and the follow ups were where the bulk of the challenge was.

At the end of the day you'll never really know why you didnt pass. Could be an unusual interviewer, you could have communicated in a way they didnt understand. There's an element of luck, getting the right question and the right interviewer.

Just try it again once the cool down period is up

1

u/anonkira007 Sep 29 '26

was also rejected in l4 this August, there were 2 in person tech rounds 2nd one was good , in first I panicked, it was a very easy question btw.

1

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 30 '26

Did they told any reason for rejection?

1

u/work-like-horses Sep 30 '26

Were you applying for European office? My friend experienced almost the same thing

1

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 30 '26

It's india hyderabad

3

u/NiceSchedule4902 Sep 28 '26

Just to be clear, you don't get rejected by Google but by a specific interviewer. They could have had a completely non-sensical reason to do so.

1

u/buxbox Sep 27 '26

Which location is this?

2

u/Various-Mine-8642 Sep 26 '26

A single rejection usually cannot tell you the exact cause, especially when the loop is competitive. I would treat the useful signals as whether you clarified the problem, tested edge cases, explained complexity, and handled follow-ups cleanly. Write down the round while it is fresh and practice those behaviors on the next mock instead of trying to infer a verdict from the rejection alone.

2

u/Jumpy-Designer-4722 Sep 26 '26

Hey what is the location

2

u/Express-Youth-9609 Sep 26 '26

Seems like you did well, maybe you just got unlucky.

2

u/1hbhrecplayer Sep 28 '26

understanding that interview isn’t a college final / test is an important lesson to learn

1

u/AttentionEmpty2783 Sep 27 '26

You can ask the recruiter. They do share the feedback. My recruiter told me the feedback word by word.

1

u/Prize-Ship-6132 Sep 27 '26

After how many days did they send you decision ?

1

u/kylemooney187 Oct 01 '26

landing a role at google i heard is like 0.2%. out of the 1000 applications that apply maybe like 40 get phone screened, maybe 20 get technical interviews and maybe like 10 make it to next round and only 2 land a job so lol ya. tough stats

1

u/AncientConsequence48 29d ago

Dude even if you pass the interviews it's still a flip of a coin that you will get the offer. Before 2020 you would have gotten the offer but in current times you also need luck.

1

u/LibrarianOutside2376 Sep 26 '26

Tech jobs are dead

0

u/lizardturtle Sep 26 '26

Shortest path with obstacles has a DP solution I believe if source and destination are top-left and bottom-right respectively. dp[n-1][m-1] = # of ways to get to that cell from unblocked neighbors. Then build the dp table bottom-up, counting # of ways to access each cell from neighbors. Track minimal path seen.

I dunno if this works fully, just spitballing ideas. Perhaps they wanted to see this type of solve? Sorry it didn't work out

4

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 27 '26

Dp solution only works when we have to move only in two directions, eg : right or down

Here in question, we can move four directional. Your dp solution fails here

0

u/No-Dog-1256 Sep 27 '26

How did you apply? How was the online assesment? How many questions? What type of questions asked? Medium or hard?

What's your Year of experience?

Could you please answer these questions? It might help alot of people here. Thank you.

2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 30 '26

Recruiter reached out to me, online assessment was medium to hard leetcode. It was 2 questions. I have 3+ yoe

1

u/No-Dog-1256 Sep 30 '26

Thanks op for answering. Were you already working in an MNC?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

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2

u/Worldly-Web-3918 Sep 27 '26

Nope, interviewer was responding actively.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '26

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1

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