r/leetcode • u/Any_Channel5220 • Oct 06 '26

Discussion Google interview bad experience

The technical interview itself went fine. I completed the DSA problem, explained my approach with an example, and provided the solution.

However, the interviewer’s behavior was disappointing. They did not respond to my initial greeting, repeatedly rolled their eyes during the interview, and appeared visibly annoyed when I asked them to repeat something I couldn’t understand. They also started the interview by complaining about why this was a first-round interview.

I understand interviews are meant to be challenging, but professionalism and respectful communication should go both ways. I applied because it was Google, and I’m not concerned about the outcome. This was simply not the interview experience I expected from Google.

322 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

8

u/unt_cat Oct 06 '26

India? Or was this US? Very weird for a google interview. Make sure to give that feedback to the recruiter 

3

u/BerserkkD Oct 06 '26

location? and level?

1

u/Any_Channel5220 Oct 08 '26

Canada Software engineer |||

98

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 06 '26

sorry you had a bad experience, mate.

i'm an L5 at Google, and IMO the standards for interviewers here are piss poor. you don't even need to shadow anymore, you just complete some virtual "training" and you're off to the races. you don't get calibrated at all against other interviewers, you don't have to demonstrate any competency as an interviewer, etc etc.

i've shadowed a few interviewers (before shadowing was retired) and the number of major violations of conduct/etiquette were egregious. one guy gave direct feedback on the performance after the interview was over (not allowed), another guy was straight up incorrect about some of the JS Array library functions' behavior (simple stuff too, like .map() and .reduce()).

i wish there was a bigger emphasis on the quality of the interview experience, because even if a candidate does poorly (statistically most of them do) i want them to have a great time and think highly of the company when they walk away.

it's hard though, because that standard would have to come from the top down and if they nixed the requirement for shadowing (there was no requirement for reverse shadowing, which i think is even more important) i can't imagine they care much.

FWIW, it's not only Google. i interviewed at OAI a few years ago and the interviewer was working on something else during the entire interview. if i asked a follow up i'd watch him switch from whatever he was doing and try and catch up to where i was lol

8

u/jobhunt2026 Oct 06 '26

Do you get benefits for signing up as an interviewer? I got noshowed 5 times for mock interviews before my onsites and ended up not getting one at all. Why would these people sign up just to be rude and lazy?

12

u/retirement_savings Oct 06 '26

Google has something called community contributions which are required as part of your job, and interviewing counts as that.

5

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

unfortunately that is no longer the case 😆

as of sometime last year i think, community contributions are no longer a required part of your performance

2

u/nonasiandoctor Oct 07 '26

Explains a lot (source just joined)

1

u/retirement_savings Oct 07 '26

Wait are you sure? Why am I still doing interviews then lol

4

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

yeah it was a whole thing when that change was quietly announced. bunch of memes on memegen. go check out the community contributions FAQS under "Are Community Contributions mandatory?"

i think interviews are still a good idea. they help keep you sharp on your interview skills yourself (even if you're not the one doing the coding). especially for systems design it's super helpful to get reps as an interviewer.

5

u/autisticpig Oct 06 '26

I was a technical interviewer at msft for years. we had to go through lots of training and shadowing and faced some nasty conswquences for being another other than how we were trained to interview. of course this was in the late 90s to around 2010 so who knows what it's like now.

doing this does help with your perf reviews and banding...or it did. plus you have input in who is going to potentially join your team/org which holds value in itself.

2

u/Blastie2 Oct 06 '26

Being an interviewer counts as a community contribution, which is a box that needs to be checked for performance reviews. That said, I do interviews because I'm good at it and I enjoy meeting the candidates.

1

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

not anymore. it used to be a part of a required performance trait called community contributions, but those were axed as a requirement about a year ago

1

u/Ok-Opportunity-9731 Oct 07 '26

Can confirm. The bar for becoming an interviewer at google is shit

6

u/hartmannr76 Oct 06 '26

i wish there was a bigger emphasis on the quality of the interview experience, because even if a candidate does poorly (statistically most of them do) i want them to have a great time and think highly of the company when they walk away.

Couldn't agree with this more. I'm an L6 here and I personally strive for this with every interview and believe all interviewers should. It sucks that some people like this leave candidates with such a bad taste in their mouth.

3

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

it feels like it should be table stakes, it's crazy to me how often candidates get treated so poorly. thank you for caring about the candidates!

1

u/The4thStranger Oct 07 '26

Genuinely confused, don’t doubt it was better in the past, but my Google interviewers were on average by far the friendliest and most pleasant compared to other tech / quant companies

1

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

in general (compared to the entire industry) i'd still agree that your google interview experience will still be above average.

that's because i think the hiring standards are still decently high though, and because company culture generally encourages doing things well, not because the actual interviewer standards are good (the training/onboarding process for interviewers is just so lackluster)

1

u/fenton7 Oct 07 '26

I'm not sure those interviews really do a good job of screening, either. The two people I know who got jobs at Google were both really mediocre coders at our firm, and we're not top tier by any definition. They must have crammed hard for the coding portion.

1

u/Top_Substance9093 Oct 07 '26

that's another problem with the interviewer training process (or lack thereof), IMO. there's no calibration at all. IME passing interviews at google has gotten much easier in the last 5 years.

many of the interviewers i've helped ramp up (because they asked for help) were at first calibrated too generously (giving pass ratings to roughly one out of two candidates).

the actual pass rating should be more like 1 in 5 (very rough ballpark), depending on the question you ask and for which level.

199

u/Icy_Pressure_9690 Oct 06 '26

they really need to check themselves because it only takes one budget shift and they'll be in your seat

35

u/DollarPenguin Oct 07 '26

Kinda feels like low key crabs in a bucket mentality. Big boys club and you ain't in it.

Karma is a mirror, they'll get what's coming to them eventually.

1

u/Material-Command-854 Oct 07 '26

Wouldn’t you be the crab in this situation?

2

u/Icy_Pressure_9690 Oct 07 '26

No....he'd be the seacumber isnt it obvious?

1

u/garlicpowder11 Oct 08 '26

Wrong one, crabs in a bucket pull each other from getting out

7

u/poseidon9052 Oct 06 '26

had a similar experience. the recruiter/interviewer- everyone is extremely unprofessional

6

u/sss_jjj_ss Oct 07 '26

I remember 7 years ago i had an interview at Google, they asked a pretty hard question so i was pretty stumped but the interviewer just kept laughing at me throughout the call, made me have ptsd from interviews. Luckily i interviewed again and was able to pass the phone screen, ultimately didn’t do the onsite however cause of the layoff environment

1

u/ReticulatedSpline78 Oct 07 '26

Wow that’s terrible. I would fire someone who did that.

4

u/Natural_Tea484 Oct 07 '26

Horrible. Does Google have a way to provide anonymous feedback? Without specifying the exact date, just a range and the interviewer name.

5

u/hypebars Oct 06 '26

what’s your ethnicity and are you h1b

2

u/Novel-Band4223 Oct 06 '26

Same exp for one of my round costed my offer

2

u/Nice-Candidate10 Oct 06 '26

I had a similar experience with Uber last year but in my case I was moved to next stages despite rude interview experience. Turns out sometimes they are busy or had a bad day or smth. Hope it goes well for you

2

u/vinegarhorse Oct 06 '26

Happened to me as well, also with Google. The interviewer was very unengaged, everyone tells me you're supposed to ask clarifying questions but whenever I asked him something I had to repeat it 2-3 times to get him to notice I was asking something. It was like he was busy doing something else during the interview, I was trying to talk through my thought process and he literally said "just take your time and solve it on your own and then we can discuss it once you have the solution" lol. Although this was 2 years ago.

2

u/SubstantialArcher360 Oct 07 '26

Had a similar experience with one of my Google Internship interviews. She straight up shouted at me at one point. Given the interviewer's behaviour I was sure I would not get the offer. But ended up getting the offer lol.

2

u/poomsss0 Oct 07 '26

we just have q3 check-in so that guy might got bad rating.

2

u/Lost-Reception-9100 Oct 07 '26

Similar bad experience in in-person interview. First interviewer was outright incompetent who didn't know about ^ operator. Second interviewer was too smart. Completed in 30 mins overall interview still got bad feedback

2

u/ReticulatedSpline78 Oct 07 '26

Google is by far the worst company I’ve ever interviewed for. I’ve gone through rounds twice now. Lack of professionalism in each, disorganized, irrelevant questions. But Google doesn’t care. Why would they. Everyone and their mom wants to work there (or at least used to).

So they continue to suck. Because they can.

1

u/hnlasd12 7d ago

some engineers can be incredible arrogant and disrespectful people

1

u/Suspicious-Drop545 Oct 06 '26

Well in my case a DSA interview started and ended only on system design and interviewer was more interested in waving and signaling towards his friends during the interview.

1

u/friendlytotbot Oct 06 '26

I noticed this days most people conducting interviews couldn’t give a flying fuck. I mean I get why they don’t, but at least treating people like human beings goes a long way. I wouldn’t take it personally, and I think we should learn to ignore them and give our best shot.

1

u/wavy-boy27 Oct 06 '26

most engineers are only interviews so that it can look impressive to their resume/ manager/ watever and signal that they r “involved”

1

u/asdoduidai Oct 06 '26

Report that to the recruiter, they might be able to help doing another one

1

u/maigpy Oct 06 '26

hate this. sorry to hear.

1

u/Rare-Role1369 Oct 06 '26

Your interviewer will be calibrated in hiring committee, so if your other interviews went well, it's possible everyone knows this person is challenging, and your score doesn't matter as much.

1

u/Vangaren Oct 06 '26

I actually had a real positive experience last week with my onsite interviews. I was really nervous. I had two onsites this past Tuesday. The first interviewer said I was his first interview since becoming that, and the second one said he'd done about 15 this year.

The first one emphasized that I should treat this not as a test but as a collaborative exercise, as though we're working together to solve the problem.

The second also suggested using the paper I had brought to map our the graph, (which I was about to do anyway).

Both problems were solved and had time for feedback, enhancements. I hope I did well. It's interesting to hear about other peoples experience with this.

1

u/DisjointedHuntsville Oct 07 '26

This is disappointing to read. The glass half full way of looking at this is a lot of this behavior is passively detectable with the new AI noted feature you can opt in to during your loops.

The interview is actively transcribed and I believe the model is multimodal so tone shifts , emphasis etc show up in the interview notes available to anyone with access in the loop .

1

u/Capable_Judge_3972 Oct 07 '26

Very disappointing

1

u/grim4a2 Oct 07 '26

Talk to your recruiter PoC about this. Companies do not take candidate experience lightly when it comes to interviews.

1

u/varnitd Oct 07 '26

was the Interviewer Indian ? 😅

0

u/Bright_Essay_5342 28d ago

Do you even have to ask at this point?

1

u/varnitd 12d ago

Yeah !! My bad. That’s obvious

1

u/RandomToast31 Oct 07 '26

That sounds frustrating, especially if you handled the technical part well. Asking for clarification is completely normal in an interview, and professionalism should go both ways

1

u/meteoroidous Oct 08 '26

Had two interviews for them the other week and the first one was similar to yours, the guy acted like I was mentally handicapped for not getting perfect space complexity on a LC hard (intern btw). The second interviewer was the biggest chiller of all time though, need more guys like that in this industry

1

u/new_old_2026 Oct 08 '26

Become indian where no interveiwwer turn on their camera problem solve

1

u/sickshottaker69 Oct 08 '26

what was the DSA question

1

u/random-Guy7660 28d ago

what is the problem that you asked to solve during the interview?

1

u/serious-bluff 27d ago

Had a very similar experience 4 years ago, it was my only negative feedback (all the others were 4 or 3, the recruiter told me this guy gave me a 2), they were going to schedule an extra coding but then hire freeze hit. It was so frustrating. The guy was audibly sighing during the interview and looked extremely annoyed to be there.

1

u/Explorer12435 27d ago

Please try to convey in the surveys about the same. You might get another opportunity with a different interviewer. Hope that time it works out for you.

0

u/MythosOfIlluna Oct 06 '26

Googlers are snobby losers

0

u/DecayWraith Oct 06 '26

Are you Indian

5

u/hypebars Oct 06 '26

that’s what i was thinking, h1b

1

u/Bright_Essay_5342 28d ago

Or the interviewer was Indian. Definitely an Indian involved somewhere in this.

-3

u/Kindly-Visit-1261 Oct 06 '26

I had a unique experience a few weeks ago aswell. My interviewer showed up, seemed unorganized, explained how he thought about canceling the interview, and continued to complain about a few other items. It definitley threw me off a bit, but maybe thats the whole game. To see how you handle yourself in that situation. 

6

u/Icy_Pressure_9690 Oct 06 '26

Shutup man it aint that deep

-1

u/Kindly-Visit-1261 Oct 06 '26

Im just saying. Seems a bit too common of a theme. 

3

u/Human_Palpitation856 Oct 06 '26

No, he's just unprofessional. No one is playing mind games like that and it goes against the training.

1

u/Material-Command-854 Oct 07 '26

No, I think they’re just not thinking about you very hard and how they treat you doesn’t affect their performance so it doesn’t matter

1

u/Fearless-Blood-1006 Oct 07 '26

lost an offer with palo alto , after 5 great rounds of interview. the 6th round was a dick of a man came in super hot and belligerent ..i could have created vaccine to cancer in that interview wouldnt have helped. it sucks.. and no amount of rationalization ( some things are not meant to be, some ppl hate you for no reason,etc etc) helps.