Google Software Engineer interview questions

Had two phone interviews with Google. First interview was an algorithm to balance paranthesis in a string, and some design questions. I provided the solution, wrote the code, suggested improvements and answered the design questions as well. Interviewer was very courteous and also showed he respected my years of experience in the industry. Second phone screen however was frustrating. The coding algorithm problem itself was not hard - it was a substring extraction problem given a certain condition. You will find a lot of examples on this website and I have solved similar kinds of problems. Halfway through the problem, the interviewer started munching on an apple. I could clearly hear the crunch and chewing and needless to say, it was distracting. I lost my train of thought and made a few mistakes and I knew before the call ended that I had to correct a number of things to make my code work. I guess I already knew the outcome of the call at that time. Disappointing thing is I took a break and later attempted the problem myself and was able to do it in 20 minutes. It was a silly and frustrating thing to happen and I feel disappointed that a good opportunity has been lost when the question is something I could have easily solved.. I guess you do need luck.

0) Internal referal of my email address, no resume. 1) Recruiter Contact 2) Submit resume and go over basic questions on interests and experience. Schedule technical phone interview 3) Phone Interview 4) One week later, I inquire over email whether I passed. Receive follow up immediately that they would like to schedule onsite. 5) Transferred to different recruiter. Submit a full application and more details. 6) Onsite, 3 interviews, lunch, 2 more interviews. 7) One week later, receive news that I passed interviews and first hiring committee 8) Submit references 9) Passed more committees and goes to team matching 10) Contact with actual manager, come to mutual agreement 11) Offer A few notes: Take your time, don't be afraid to ask for a later interview date to study up. I went over Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle, its a good book to review basic concepts. No questions I got actually came out of the book, but its good mental prep for the kind of problems you'll face. Also try top coder to work on coding if you are out of date writing actual code. I feel top coder questions are a bit brute force compared to the questions you'll get. Top coder questions ask you to accomplish a task, but the extent of what you'll end up using is arrays and strings. You won't get good coverage of things like trees, linked lists, etcs. Don't assume you'll need to get everything right during interviews. I didn't for sure and one interviewer had a distinctly negative attitude (whether this was intended or he actually flunked me I don't know), but I still ended up doing well enough to pass. Also, don't worry about the interviewers typing or writing during the interview. Apparently, they need to take all of your code verbatim to give to the hiring committee, so however much you write, they need to write. Stay calm and talk through your answers. Don't assume you did poorly or well, its too hard to guess and treat each interviewer individually. Overall a long process, but a fair one. In engineering its important to keep standards high and consistent.