I am from an embedded background. I applied for a Software Engineer position at Google (embedded domain).
Got a call from HR almost after 1.5 months asking me to brush up on data structures and algorithms for the telephonic round. I practiced using Leet code for about two weeks (thanks to this platform).
店面
- Interviewer introduced himself
- Embedded Coding Question.
Write a driver wrapper API on top of an existing driver API.
Driver API
size_t read(size_t* buf) // this driver API reads 512 bytes from a pheripheral
// Write wrapper as below
size_t read_bytes(struct *rs, size_t* buf, size_t count) // You need to return count bytes in the buffer.
The interviewer did not explain the problem rather asked me to go throw the problem written on a google document. It took me little time to understand the trick involved. Since the driver API reads only 512 bytes you need to cache the data inside the wrapper API when the caller wants to read less. The ‘rs’ variable can maintain a state machine to know whether you have something read in your internal buffer on not.
The time I had to figure out and code is less than 10 mins. In that, I was able to finish 60 % of the coding.
If I had been given a couple of more minutes then I could have finished it but the interviewer wanted to move to the next topic. I was under the impression that he is convinced with my approach.
The interviewer asked me about a few domain related questions and my background. He does not seem to be interested in my answers as I could see him doing his own job via the cam. We finished the interview in 40 mins.
I got a call from HR after two days saying that they don’t want to take it forward as they feel my algorithm and data structure part is not up to google’s standards.
I was surprised to see this feedback. If the interviewer felt that the coding was not up to the mark then would not it have made sense to give the candidate couple of more minutes than spending time on questions which were merely asked for the sake for interview completeness.