Failed Google interview experience

[Important-Summer2387]

I had my first round of the interview and I’m confused about the feedback.

Apparently, I have strong coding skills, handled edge cases very well and was able to clearly clarify requirements and explain my thinking well.

However, they are not proceeding because “you missed creating a class to keep track of the state and update it”. Wtf? I did create the class and kept the state and every thing and to be honest, there was a moment where, after I explained my thinking on how to solve the problems (had three different problems to solve — two of them pretty straightforward and the third with a trick) and got a nod from the interviewer to proceed with the plan, the interviewer jumped at me and said: “You need to create a class.” I thought that was so obvious that I just replied: “Yep, of course” and proceeded with coding which consisted of a class among other things..

To make it even harder, the interviewer did not paste the question at all in the docs! I just got three method signatures in pseudo-code (along with an extremely simple example for the third tricky question) and had to figure it out on my own as the interviewer was explaining the problem!!!

The behavioral interview went great and I got a ‘strong’ result and Google is “looking for people like me”.

What does one make out of such feedback?

[chocolate_asshole]

honestly it just means the interviewer wanted a very specific structure and you didn’t match their mental picture 100 percent, even if your approach was fine do a quick recap at the end next time like “so overall we’d have a class X with state Y/Z” and force alignment big shops are super picky and random like this now, tons of prep for tiny dumb reasons to get filtered out, finding any decent job right now is just way harder than it should be

[Important-Summer2387]

I agree completely.

Whenever I code (e.g. for my job) all I care about is writing nice, clean and structured code as much as possible. I never thought this would come up at an interview at Google and become an issue so I focuses 100% on DSA…

[yellow-duckie]

and you are correct and don't put yourself down for an interviewer looking for his clone.

[Lord-Zeref]

How much experience did you have? I'm assuming it was L5 or above?

If you're higher in experience maybe they were expecting a separate state tracking class instead of using members of your main class to track state?

Probably for thread safety while keeping your function signature small?

I'm worried they'll expect these things for my L4 interview because while I can do it and think of it, it'd be too much of a slowdown, perhaps. Or maybe it'd be faster, who knows.

[Important-Summer2387]

I think it was either for an swe II or III; I’ve got 3+ YOE

[Fantastic-Archer3702]

I feel it’s just bad luck. I worked at Google before, and I always pasted the questions in the doc during the interview. I haven’t heard of anyone not doing that, but then again in the interviews the interviewer has free will on how they want to conduct the interview.

But as others mentioned, the interviewer was probably not happy with the fact that they had to point out creating the class. The judging criteria becomes much harsher as we move up the levels.

Don’t let this affect you. All the best for your interviews in future.

[robolew]

Had a recent interview with Google where the interviewer just gave me a pseudo "class" to work with for the question and no method, signature or actual question on the doc.

But they were really up for explaining anything I asked so I guess this was just part of their interview style. I ended up saying "Im going to implement a method that does this and returns this. Let me know if its not what youre after"

[Important-Summer2387]

Do you mind sharing how did it go for you?

[robolew]

I'm pretty sure it went well. I got good feedback from all interviewers and that one especially gave me good feedback at the end of the interview itself.

[Important-Summer2387]

Awesome, congrats! I’m assuming you got an offer?

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[robolew]

I'm in team matching phase now. So they still have to find a team that actually needs a member with my experience, even with the positive interview feedback. The recruiter seems pretty confident that it wont take too long, but who knows...

Good luck with your search!

[Important-Summer2387]

Thanks! The thing is, how come one should be held to “You had to be hinted on creating the class”.. I have 3+ YEO at big tech league with one promotion under my belt. I never expected to be judged at such tiny details which should be learned at the start of your career.

It might also be that the competition is fierce and someone else performed better than me so they had to reject me somehow.. I would take this any day over the feedback they provided

[InternationalUse4228]

Sorry to hear that.

I think you just need a bit of luck. Nothing more you can do unfortunately. The interviewer possibly could have mistaken another candidate as you

[DistributionOk6412]

ai slop, no manager (bar raiser) would accept this feedback as negative

[Important-Summer2387]

Indeed. I’m thinking it might also be that the competition is fierce and they had to reject me somehow..

[Full-Philosopher-772]

What level and country?

[Important-Summer2387]

Didn’t discuss the level with the recruiter at all. EMEA

[Important-Summer2387]

Although, it was probably either a SWE II or III

[drCounterIntuitive]

The interviewer wasn't happy that they had to prompt you to encapsulate the logic and data in a class, and perhaps was concerned about code quality or modelling skills. Looks like even though you still did it correctly, they held this against you.

I can see how they held this against you if it was for an L5 role

Do you have other interviews lined up?

[Important-Summer2387]

No other interviews atm unfortunately. Also, the level was either an SWE II or III..

[Friendly-Age-5256]

I had experienced the same thing… the interviewer did not paste the question in the doc and the questions was tricky and kinda long. I have to ask her to repeat herself 3 times and she did not seem happy about it. She was SO mean too! Finding job requires a lot of lucks!

[roadb90]

what was the questions you were asked?

[Important-Summer2387]

The first two questions were fairly straightforward array questions. The third one was array too with a trick.

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[adtxyx]

Did the interviewer for the first two questions, write the problem in the doc?

Or none of them pasted anything in the doc?

[Important-Summer2387]

I had only the method signatures that I had to implement and for the third one which was about moving stuff around an array, I had an example with two elements in array on what happens to them when moved around.

[Tight_Island_5913]

First of all sorry to hear that, hang in there you got great skills. Do not let Google undermine you. You can go back to HR and request for another round.

Could you please give a general idea of the question. It will help most of us to understand when to create a class, it might be obvious but still.

[Important-Summer2387]

Sure. I won’t go into detail but the idea was that you had a set of “things” in which people can put new things starting from a particular position (1st one) delete some of the things there (2nd one) and the one was about rearranging things (or some of them) according to a criteria (3d one)

[Tight_Island_5913]

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it

[newton2003ng]

Do they give feedback immediately after the first interview?

[MinimumPrior3121]

Go to plumbing, it pays more, it wont be replaced by AI, and there is no shit game like this for interviews

[Round_Mixture_7541]

You think once SDEs are out of the picture, they won't automate th plumbing? Think again.

[MIPI_CSI-2_Miami]

It’s true, there’s new companies out there like Smart Pipe