First, let me say, having the opportunity to be there at the place where things happen lol, was like an adrenaline injection to the heart. If something, I want now more than ever to move here to California and work for a company like Google no matter how much effort it takes me. The energy among the people is amazing and to see how much they care about what are doing and the level of professionalism that the whole place inspires has no comparison to any I’ve seen before. Also, so cool to have that many food trucks and free coffee around lol.
The first interview was the behavioral and situations interview; in my opinion, I want to say that it went well because I managed to answer a lot of questions and my interviewer seemed pleased about my answers and details. Also, because he was typing all the time on his laptop taking a lot of notes and on many occasions he seemed to shake his head on approval because I was able to mention situations where I had to deal with the same stuff in the past and my answers were detailed but to the point. Maybe I’m wrong but I think it went well.
The second interview was with two developers (one shadowing) and was the first of the coding ones, in this case, I got a bit nervous because I was expecting to get a super hard to do exercise, I tried mostly to prepare for the level medium and hard exercises, so what happened is that I complicated my answer a bit and ended up giving not a really good answer when coding on the whiteboard. I even got a bit upset with myself because 10 minutes before the end of the interview I thought about the best answer which was different from what I coded on the board. At least tried at the end to explain my interviewer the improvements that I would make to my code and in order to make it more efficient.
The third interview was, in my opinion, the one I did the best, my interviewer was extremely helpful because he didn’t jump right straight to the exercise but asked a quick question about some stuff on my resume that I’ve done and he was curious, then he asked me to explain how would I solved an exercise and after giving him my answer he told me to write a bit of code on how would it look like. After 5 minutes of writing on the board I had to put a smile on my face I realized that I was writing my solution to an exercise but the way he directed the interview and how he presented the whole situation was so natural that I felt really on the zone and could provide a good answer. After finishing it up, he started asking me questions about possible scenarios if it was a real requirement and how would I change the input data to make faster. I did all of that and after that he even said to me: “I see we have a bit more time so I’m gonna ask you another question but do not code it, just tell me how would you solve it”. We finish up on time right for lunch.
The fourth interview was mostly a design system one and knowledge about Javascript. Basically, my interviewer was looking to see if I had domain over closures and how would I build a system that feeds a feature similar to the cards that we see on Instagram. Because I architected and implemented a similar feature (frontend and backend) I was able to give a detailed answer. He then asked me about specifics on those and to write down how some code would look like. I did that and answer all of his questions. I think it went well because we ended up having 5 minutes left on the clock and my interviewer then asked me if I had any questions for him about his work and Google.
The 5th, and last interview, was with two developers (one shadowing) and it was about HTML and how to dynamically make a table with some sequentially presented numbers. I said that I was gonna do it as if I was using Angular, because my experience is using Angular and not doing “raw” HTML with jQuery or something like that. So, I put how my HTML with components would look like and the Typescript code. The final part I couldn’t complete it because our interview was cut short. Apparently, there was a mistake with the booked room and we had to vacate it. The part that I was missing to finish the implementation was the formula that I was going to use to calculate the number that will be placed in the cell. However, my interviewer said he was going to make a note about it because he found weird that our interview didn’t have all the time I was supposed to have.
No matter what is the decision of the hiring committee, I’m gonna keep studying my LeetCode exercises and see if in the future I can have the opportunity to present myself for the process again. That way I could have had more time to prepare and especially now that I know how a Google interview looks like, all my concerns fade away. If someone asks me what to expect I would say: “your tougher interviewer is yourself, so do yourself a favor and cool it down” .
This experience was unique and helped me to learn one important thing: I can feel it on my core that it is there at Mountain View working for Google where I want to be.