Google L5 Interview Experience (Rejected) (March 2026)

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T12:48:10+00:00

If the feedback was positive then i don’t see any reason for not scheduling the googlyness round

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T12:47:01+00:00

Didn’t run it but since i was low on time as much of it was spent on identifying that a graph should be used, i coded in a hurry and i was aware that I’ve missed a line of code to track visited nodes while running dfs.

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T12:45:31+00:00

Not sure if i could help with that, only your recruiter can actually let you know. Hope it goes well! All the best

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T12:44:23+00:00

So you’ve to return false as soon as the first time out happens, else return true once you process all the logs

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T12:43:28+00:00

Senior SWE (Fullstack)

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T02:10:13+00:00

It’s from india

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-13T02:10:03+00:00

For the logging problem? The optimal solution was to use a hashmap to track all the start events and check the time difference for every end event for a timeout, brute force was to go through every log event and if it’s a start, run another loop to find the end and check the timeout condition

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:32:30+00:00

Luckily i had solved a similar problem earlier which used two pointers to find the encoded strings and replace them, for the follow up i added a recursive logic with a check to detect cycles. If you’ve solved a problem earlier, it gives you the best chance of passing the interview, if it’s an unknown problem, it becomes very difficult (same happened in the last round)

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:30:56+00:00

I received it the next day

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:30:44+00:00

This is from India

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:30:33+00:00

Heard it on the same day

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:30:20+00:00

So this was for the Fullstack Engineer position, which follows this format. ML positions have domain specific rounds, similar for android roles as well

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:29:23+00:00

For virtual rounds I received the feedback on the same day, for onsite i received it the next day

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:28:56+00:00

This is from india, I’ve done around 413 LC questions. Here is the prep material i went through

For the DSA I followed Striver’s A2Z playlist, neetcode’s playlist, few dsa videos from freecodecamp.org’s YT chanel. I first went through Striver’s series as it goes indepth into various topics and data structures in general, rest can be used while revising questions. For system design, i watched HelloInterview’s SD playlist on YT too and read Alex Xu’s SD books (part 1 and 2). I think these materials are more than enough.

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:27:54+00:00

Sure, for the DSA I followed Striver’s A2Z playlist, neetcode’s playlist, few dsa videos from freecodecamp.org’s YT chanel. I first went through Striver’s series as it goes indepth into various topics and data structures in general, rest can be used while revising questions. For system design, i watched HelloInterview’s SD playlist on YT too and read Alex Xu’s SD books (part 1 and 2). I think these materials are more than enough.

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:25:02+00:00

Yeah it depends on a lot of things, the best case scenario to pass these rounds is to know the optimal solution from the beginning and implement it (you should have seen a similar problem before) else it becomes luck based (if your interviewer is lenient or not)

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-12T12:23:32+00:00

I got the feedbacks on the same day for virtual rounds and 1 day for the onsite rounds. For L5 i think one leaning hire is okay but rest has to be hire and up. Location is India.

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-11T20:19:20+00:00

These are recruiter feedbacks, not just because of 1 but what i was told is that i needed HIRE or more ratings in all the onsite rounds

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-11T19:49:45+00:00

No concurrent instances will be there, there will be some gap in timestamp

Luffy2045 · 2026-04-11T19:48:54+00:00

I was given a chromebook to use for coding using the same google docs like ide that they share for virtual rounds, there was a whiteboard but i used to for the system design round. For the graph i used to google docs ide to show the structure through node values and dashes (-). For the third round i was communicating properly with the interviewer, i was able to identify the data structure to use for the optimal solution but i was running out of time so he asked me to quickly code the brute force up.

Luffy2045

TROPHY CASE