How to prepare for a Google interview in 2 weeks

Are you a software engineer preparing for a Google interview? This blog will outline how to prepare for a Google interview in 2 weeks. We will provide tips on how to improve your coding skills, practice algorithms and data structures, and boost your interviewing skills. If you follow these tips, you will be well prepared for your upcoming Google interview! Good luck!

Why do you want to work at Google?

Google is often cited as the software developer's dream company. Industry experts laud Google for its technical expertise, strong product offerings, and cutting-edge technologies. In addition, Google is known for having a strong company culture that values creativity and collaboration. For these reasons, it's no surprise that many software engineers want to work for Google.

Google provides software engineers with an opportunity to work on some of the most popular products in the world. As a result, engineers at Google have the chance to make a real impact on millions of users. In addition, they get to work with some of the most talented people in the industry.

The company culture also encourages creativity and allows engineers to experiment with new ideas. All of these factors combine to make Google a very attractive option for software engineers even though the actual interview process can take 2-3 months.

Hiring process

The interview process is the ultimate test of your coding and design capabilities. If you consider yourself a future full-time software engineer at Google let's go through the most important topic connected with the hiring process.

Structure of the interview process

Like most big tech companies Google has multistep interviews. Let's split the interview process into these main parts:

• Prepare your resume and apply online.

• Phone screening interview.

• On-site interviews.

• Hiring committee and executive reviews.

Prepare your resume and apply online.

Google employees advise creating a new resume from scratch for each job position. Keep it short as Google has its requirements for a job position. Focus on highlighting your skills that are relevant to the particular job you want. Relevant education will make your CV more attractive as well.

Try to measure the success that you archived on the previous projects. Be specific on the things that you have managed.

Mention your leadership experience. Specify which team have you worked with, how big they were, and what was the scope and responsibility area of your team.

To apply you can use the careers search tool to find the most relevant Google position for your location.

Phone screening interview.

Before coding interview questions you can have an initial phone screen with a recruiter. On the phone screen, you will be asked to share your professional experience and expectations.

The Google recruiter will share the details about the technical interview process and ask how long will it take for you for interview prep, to schedule a technical interview. The Google recruiter will also share some online resources that can be used during the preparation.

Coding interview

On the day of the technical phone screen, you will join a Google Hangout call. This interview is usually conducted by a software engineer and will include your sharing of past experiences and some relevant questions from the host. It will take nearly half the time. After all the theoretical questions, you will be asked to solve a practice coding challenge.

Practice coding interview part is usually connected with some basic computer science topics such as data structures and algorithms. You should be well familiar with linked lists, hash tables, dynamic programming, and sorting algorithms.

After you see the get technical challenge task before writing code you have to ask some questions to validate that you understood it correctly and check some edge cases, such as limitations of the values or expectations from input parameters.

Here is an example of a possible code challenge:

You are given a linked list where the node has two pointers. The first is the regular ‘next' pointer. The second pointer is called ‘arbitrary_pointer' and it can point to any node in the linked list. Your job is to write code to make a deep copy of the given linked list. Here, deep copy means that any operations on the original list (inserting, modifying and removing) should not affect the copied list.

To implement the solution you will not use your favourite IDE. Instead of this, you will use Google docs. You are allowed to use any programming language, but you should be sure that at the end of the Google coding interview you have the well compiled and runnable code.

Choose the right data structure, keep in mind memory usage and time complexity, and share your thought process while you write code.

In a couple of days, the Google recruiter will come back to you with pretty detailed feedback and the decision if you can proceed with the on-site interview.

On-site interviews

Google's most important and challenging part of the hiring process is the in-depth on-site interview. Usually, it takes 4-5 sessions 45 minutes each. Some of them are one-to-one, others are a panel.

During the interview, there will be no discussion about your past experiences or achievements. This type of technical interview are well structured and will check your skills in computer science, solving problems, and being in a not familiar environment. One session will be connected with your level of "Googleyness". We will discuss this term later.

Additionally, you can be invited to a system design interview. Instead of a coding interview, the design interview will check your architectural skills and the way you ask questions about the functional and non-functional requirements of the system. You can be asked to design some products that Google has or even invent a new one.

Hiring committee and executive reviews.

This type of Google interview is usually the longest one and is completely behind the scenes. The interview results collection and offer preparation can take several weeks. You can't have any influence on it. Nothing depends on you now. There are several steps are going under the hood.

First of all, every Google interviewer submits feedback based on the standard form with the mark if they recommend you to be hired. The hiring committee, which usually consists of experienced Googlers and senior managers, create prepares a candidate hiring packet. The decision is usually made by the majority vote.

As a final step candidate packet is reviewed by a senior leader, one of the top executives looks at all offers made by the hiring committees before they are extended to candidates. 

Skills are looked at during the hiring

During either technical or cultural fit interviews, some skills will be waiting to be presented from your side. They will affect the final decision of hiring managers.

How does the candidate think?

The importance of problem-solving skills cannot be underestimated. An interviewer will pay attention not only to the solution itself but to the way how a candidate thinks.

Problem-solving includes the way how data, logic, and reasoning are used during the question response. The thought process has a real impact on hiring decisions.

Leadership skills

Leadership skills do not necessarily come in the form of a title. Leadership means emergent leadership. How proactively you are? How are you taking leadership initiatives, raise a questions

Role-related knowledge

Transferable skills. An interviewer will check whether you have the basic skill set to transfer into the role you are looking for at Google.

Googleyness

Googleyness is the nebulous term that they kind of made up and it essentially means intellectual curiosity, whether you are willing to collaborate work with other people and think at scale. Usually, interviewers use behavioral questions to check your level of googleyness.

What Google is assessing?

As you may know, not only technical prowess is highly important in Google interviews. During sort of hypothetical and behavioral questions, the google recruiter will assess the next topics.

Understanding of the question

Your understanding of the question is really important. Google recruiter can give you too much or too little information to check whether you can define the central and core issue.

So make sure you have distilled through all of the excess noise and excess words and have the root issue at hand.

Good advice here is not to hesitate to ask any additional questions to get the most important part.

Preparation strategy

Preparation strategy is not meant how much time have you spent on interview preparation. It means how much information that's been given to you you are able to make thoughtfully parse through it and formulate a coherent and dynamic response.

Ability to identify, justify, and communicate the solution

The hypothetical questions are often open-ended and there is no right or wrong way to answer. So here is more important how you can solve problems, justify that solution and communicate that solution to google employees.

Focus on sharing your thought process and provide as many details as possible.

So how to prepare for Google interview in 2 weeks?

Based on the information about the interview process and things that are important to be shown let's prepare the plan of preparation for both Google phone interview and in-depth on-site technical interviews. With only two weeks, a reasonable break down could be study mode for one week and practice during the second one.

Soft skills

During the phone screen preparation, don't focus on the questions but on stories. Be ready for the interview to share the details about your biggest achievement, your failure, and what have you learnt from this failure. Prepare a story about your most challenging period. How did you deal with it? Have you ever had a conflict on your project? How did you resolve it? This is perhaps the only way to tackle challenging and tricky problems in the interview is to practice mock interviews.

Try to spend some time preparing answers before the hiring managers will ask you. Interview prep here leads you to have more fluent answers with less stress.

Here are some top interview questions to evaluate your soft skills:

• Have you ever been in a situation where being honest landed you in trouble?

• How do you cope when you have too much work on your plate?

• How would you explain how this Google product works to a five-year-old?

• Tell me a time when you had to "sell" or propose a solution to an Engineering or Stakeholder Team.

• Tell me what you are most passionate about outside work.

• How do you measure success in this position?

• What are your actions if employees disagreed with your decision?

• Say about something you were asked to do that you have never done before. How did you react, and what did you learn?

Googleyness

Laszlo Block, who is the former Google's Senior Vice President of People Operations has defined what Goggleyness is.

Attributes like enjoying fun (who doesn't), a certain dose of intellectual humility (it's hard to learn if you can't admit that you might be wrong), a strong measure of conscientiousness (we want owners, not employees), comfort with ambiguity (we don't know how our business will evolve, and navigating Google internally requires dealing with a lot of ambiguity), and evidence that you've taken some courageous or interesting paths in your life. 

Here are some concepts that you can consider when you think about Goggleyness:

• Being positive, friendly, and honest, act as a team player

• Being transparent, honest, and fair.

• Life-Long Learner

• Respectful, with high standards.

• Valuing Yourself and Others

• Being humble, and letting go of the ego (at least sometimes).

• Going the extra mile.

• Trustworthy and integrity

• Emotional Intelligence

Having some mock interviews with help you to highlight your skills from Google's values perspective. Prepare a couple of stories that will help to reveal yourself as a person who aligns with these principles. A mock interview can help you to be prepared for this part.

Here are some questions to evaluate your Goggleyness:

• Describe a situation where you did not get along with your manager and how you resolved it.

• Why do you want to work for Google?

• Name three of your most important considerations when working for an employer.

• How would your colleagues describe you?

Coding interviews

The coding interview part is as important as the others. Unfortunately, we can't focus on only part topics to cover during interview preparation. Google coding interview as you might hear is one of the most challenging on the market for a software engineer in comparison with other tech companies.

Anyway, it is a great goal, that will help you to improve your problem-solving skills and computer science knowledge. It isn't too difficult if you have spent the majority of your free time focusing on solving interview problems.

First of all, let's focus on the data structures and algorithms. Having solid knowledge in these areas will significantly increase our success possibilities during the technical interview. As we discussed previously these topics will be covered by a telephonic interview and on-site ones.

Speaking about coding interviews it's hard not to mention the most famous book about this topic: Cracking the Coding Interview, written by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. Don't be scared about the count of pages. This book can be a reference for the topics you need to cover. Just spend some time on the chapters you believe you need to get some details about. Like most smart people do make some class notes to have the ability roughly go through them before Google interviews.

Algorithms that are widely used during Google coding interviews:

• Breadth-first search.

• Depth-first search.

• Binary search.

• Quicksort.

• Mergesort.

• A*

• Dynamic programming.

• Divide and conquer

• Recursion

Data structures that conder to be known by a software engineer in the Google:

• Array

• Linked list

• Stack, Queue

• Graphs

• Hash tables

• Binary tree, Red-black tree

Spend your first week on these interview questions. Solid theoretical knowledge will keep you focused on choosing the right way to solve your coding challenge during a technical phone screen.

Practice

The second week is a good time to start practising. Phone interviews sometimes can be pretty stressful. Having well-grounded problem-solving experience will lead you to be confident during a coding interview.

Practice data structure and algorithmic challenges with sites like Educative, Leetcode, and other online resources. Start practising simple coding problems. This will make it easier down the line to tackle harder questions. Practice complex coding problems, and start timing yourself. It's important to consider Runtime and Memory complexity for each solution.

Don't be focused on just Binary Search. Try to cover as many topics during practice as possible.

Summary

The interview process is the ultimate test of your coding and design capabilities. There's more, though. The interview also evaluates your behavioural attributes and responses in workplace situations, as well as the scope of your professional experience to see if you're the right cultural fit.

Split your time into two pieces. The first week is all about Soft Skills, Googleyness, and theoretical knowledge. During the second week, it's time to have as much practice as possible.

Be aware. The Google interview is a long process. Your first goal is to pass the technical screen. It will award you additional time for preparation.