Senior Engineer’s Guide to Google Interviews + Questions

A Senior Engineer’s Guide to Google’s Interview Process and Questions

The Google Hiring Process and Common Questions

~20-minute read

Google’s interview process and questions

Google’s interview process consists of the following steps:

Before we get into the details of each of these steps, here are a few general notes about Google’s job interview process, evaluation criteria, and interviewers.

All human organizations behave like a metaphor; Google isn’t a sports team, or a family, or an army. It’s a cool grad school. Larry and Sergey set up their offices based on the model of a Stanford campus on purpose. They wanted to create an environment and company culture where people can feel chill enough to talk about anything. In general, Google interviewers tend to be more collaborative than other FAANG interviewers. At Google, the slower you go, the faster you get there.

Google has one centralized interview process that’s completely divorced from which team you might end up on, which means that you will NOT be interviewing with your future team members – Google has a horde of interchangeable technical interviewers who have all been trained on the same process. If you do well, there will be a team matching component at the end.

At Google, because the process is centralized, you cannot interview with multiple teams concurrently, which means you don’t get multiple shots on goal. Not only that, but Google has a limit for how many chances they’ll give you before you’re blocked from interviewing again.

Anecdote from a Google Interviewer

“You can interview three times in 5 years. If you fail all three times then you can’t interview at Google again: you’re blocked.”

Note that recently, there have been rumblings of Google changing their process to something more decentralized, where a hiring manager chooses you for a team before you interview, nullifying the need for post-onsite team matching. As far as we know, this new model is being tried out right now, but the change hasn’t been adopted company-wide.

Google also has rules for candidates who pass their interviews:

Anecdote from a Google Interviewer

“If you pass Google’s onsite, and end up not taking the offer, your “passing of the onsite” is good for about a year. And if you choose to re-engage in that time, the process varies widely.”

Google is not results-oriented. They’re process-oriented. In other words, they care more about the “How” than the “What.” You’ve heard it before, and it’s true – they don’t need you to get to the optimal solution, but they do need to be impressed by your thought process. Because of this, Google is more attracted to comfort with ambiguity than speed.

Oddly, in spite of using a centralized interview process, Google doesn’t have in-depth training for its interviewers; it may surprise some candidates that there’s a larger-than-expected number of bad interviewers at Google.

Step 1: Recruiter call

Please see the section above called “A note about recruiter calls”.

Step 2: Technical phone screen

Google’s technical phone screen is a coding interview that focuses exclusively on data structures and algorithms questions. Your interviewer will ask you to write code to solve a specific problem.

One idiosyncratic aspect of Google’s process is their insistence on using Google Docs for writing code (versus other companies that tend to use tools like CoderPad). This can be a bit jarring for those of us who are used to writing code in an IDE that does things like auto-indentation, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, adding missing parentheses or brackets, etc. Despite not using an IDE, your interviewer will expect you to produce syntactically correct code. This is really hard.

Tip to get unstuck

Before your Google interview, you should practice in Google Docs so you don’t forget to close parentheses or indent your code.

Step 2.5: (In some cases) Another technical phone screen

The second phone screen happens only if the first one did not produce enough signal to move forward. Perhaps you didn’t communicate your thought process well enough, your code wasn’t of good enough quality, or you weren’t fast enough – but it’ll be only one of these – if you struggled with two or all three, most likely you aren’t moving forward.

Tip to get unstuck

If you do get scheduled for a second phone screen, push your recruiter to give you detailed feedback so you can do better the second time – nothing beats knowing exactly where you need to improve. You probably won’t get a response, but if you do it’s a large boost to your prep.

Step 3: Onsite

The Google onsite usually includes 4-6 rounds. Recently, there have been some internal experiments with the format, but generally the rounds are primarily coding, and secondarily system design. Some candidates get a single behavioral round, and others get to skip it.

The more experience you have, the higher proportion of system design and domain-specific questions you can expect to be asked.

AI usage in Google interviews

AI usage in Google interviews is strictly prohibited.

Google’s interview types in detail

Coding

The most important rounds at Google are coding. In fact, Google is the only FAANG company that considers coding to be more important than system design. Google’s coding rounds are about complexity more than speed. Their interviewers are allowed to ask anything they want, so it's more likely you might get a question you’ve never practiced before.

System design

The second most important onsite interview type at Google is system design. High-level and low-level system design questions are both likely. Some examples include:

Google system design interviewers also tend to design problems that include linchpin questions. These are questions where if you don’t ask about a specific aspect of the problem, you can’t really solve it.

Tip to get unstuck

To avoid getting tricked, ask even more questions in Google system design rounds than you normally would.

Behavioral

The least important round at Google is the behavioral round. They have the easiest behavioral screen of all the FAANGs. Plus, you might complete an onsite at Google without a behavioral round because they’re optional. It’s not clear which candidates get them and which don’t.

If you do get some behavioral questions, they might be one of the following:

How Google makes hiring decisions

Most of the time, the post-interview feedback process at Google is completely asynchronous, and interviewers don’t meet live to discuss hiring decisions. That’s one reason why interviewing at Google isn’t like interviewing with humans: it’s more akin to interviewing with a machine. Each interviewer rates candidates on a seven-point scale: Strong No-Hire, No Hire, Leaning No-Hire, On The Fence, Leaning Hire, Hire, and Strong Hire.

If you passed overall, you will move on to the hiring committee phase.

Hiring committee review & team matching

Google’s hiring committee consists of four to five engineers and engineering managers who have not interviewed you, to make hiring decisions as objective as possible. Going into the hiring committee review, your recruiter will prepare a packet that consists of your resume, any notes from the person who referred you, and all the feedback from your interviewers, from the technical phone screen to the onsite.

Google coding interview preparation resources

Here are some tips for preparing for your Google coding interview: