Google phone screen, Mountain View, June 2017

Position : Software Engineer, Google
Location : Mountain View, CA

Technical phone screen.

The interviewer was on time and almost immediately jumped to coding questions. I personally prefer this to lengthy ( > 10 minutes) introductions.
The interview is done in a shared google doc.

First question : print linked list in reversed order (given 1->2->7, print 7->2->1). I implemented it almost instantly using recursion, then iteratively using stack. We talked about complexity and space (both O(n))

Next question : how would you implement the autocomplete search given a dictionary of all words? I implemented it using a Trie.

We had 5 minutes left. I asked the interviewer about his project(s). Received a call the next day from the recruiter inviting me onsite.

Overall experience was good. The interviewer was prepared and communicated the questions clearly. I always like an easy question to start with. Gives your confidence.
I wished the coding was done via a shared screen in my personal IDE. I don’t like (anyone does?) coding in the doc. I dislike coderpad even more.

Advice . Be short while introducing yourself, no longer than 3 minutes (time it!). Politely ask your interview to start the technical part if he keeps asking your questions or start rambling about his experience and projects. Just say “I think I am ready for the technical part”. Remember nothing really matters if you can’t/don’t have time to solve problems. Open the doc/coderpad 30 minutes before the interview and implement a couple easy algorithms to warm up: reverse a linked list, reverse a string in place, implement a merge sort, etc. You’d be surprised how rusty you are typing code without IDE help.

Good luck!