Onsite Coding Interviews

There were 3 onsite coding interviews (scheduled virtually on different dates ). I can’t disclose the exact questions because of NDA.

First Round ( 45 minutes ):

In the first interview, I was asked a medium question related to regular expression matching and a follow-up question. Once I coded both the solutions, the interviewer asked me to give an approach to solve the problem at scale.

Second Round ( 45 minutes ):

In the second round, one string-based medium question was asked. Once I coded the solution, the interviewer changed one key part of the problem and asked me to modify my solution accordingly. The basic idea behind this was perhaps to see the flexibility of my code.

Third Round ( 45 minutes ):

In the third round, one hard graph question was asked. Initially, I couldn’t figure out a good solution, but then I broke the problem into parts and tried to find the best thing I could do to solve each part. Throughout the process, I was thinking out loud and the interviewer also shared his thoughts and guided me. Ultimately we reached to a solution using graph traversal and dynamic programming.

As my feedback for all the rounds was positive, the recruiter asked for my convenient time slot for the behavioural round aka the “Googleyness” round.

• What happens in the Googleyness Round?
  So, my recruiter gave me very simple yet powerful advice for this round and that was “Be Honest”. And trust me it helped me a lot. The Googleyness round was more about imagining yourself as a Googler and then how you would react to different situations given by the interviewer. The questions were a bit tricky but this was the most fun round I had in the entire process.

Once I showed my interest, the recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call to brief me about the interview process and these expectations:

1. Coding: You should be able to write good quality code i.e. syntactically correct, fully functional, modular, and clean with proper naming conventions.
2. DS & Algo: You should be able to come up with an optimised solution using algorithms and different data structures as needed. Also, you should be well aware of the time complexity of your solution.
3. Communication: You should be thinking out loud at every stage. In other words, consider it to be a healthy discussion with one of your teammates ( the interviewer here ) on some specific problem, and you’re supposed to lead the discussion.
4. Speed of coding: It’s one of the most important aspects because generally, candidates become nervous and that impacts not only their thought process but also their coding speed. Time is limited in the interview, so practising beforehand is always suggested.