(Google Interview Prep Guide) SWE

Google Interview Prep Guide
Software Engineer
What’s a Software Engineer (SWE)?

Software Engineers (referred to as “SWEs”) at Google develop the next-generation
technologies that change how millions of users connect, explore and interact with information
and one another. As a SWE, you’ll be responsible for the whole lifecycle of a project critical to
Google’s needs, with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced
business grow and evolve. Depending upon the project you join, you could be involved in
research, design, planning, architecture, development, test, implementation and release
phases. You'll be working on products that handle information at a massive scale, bringing
fresh ideas from all areas and tackling new problems across the full-stack as we continue to
push technology forward.
Why Google? Impact.

Google is and always will be an engineering company. We hire people with a broad set of
technical skills who are ready to tackle some of technology's greatest challenges and make an
impact on millions, if not billions, of users. At Google, engineers not only revolutionize search,
they routinely work on massive scalability and storage solutions, large-scale applications and
develop entirely new platforms around the world. From AdWords to Chrome, Android to
YouTube, Cloud to Maps, Google engineers are changing the world one technological
achievement after another.
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General Interview Tips
Explain - We want to understand how you think, so explain your thought process and decision
making throughout the interview. Remember we’re not only evaluating your technical ability,
but also how you solve problems. Explicitly state and check assumptions with your interviewer
to ensure they are reasonable.
Clarify - Many questions will be deliberately open-ended to provide insight into what
categories and information you value within the technological puzzle. We’re looking to see
how you engage with the problem and your primary method for solving it. Be sure to talk
through your thought process and feel free to ask specific questions if you need clarification.
Improve - Think about ways to improve the solution you present. It’s worthwhile to think out
loud about your initial thoughts to a question. In many cases, your first answer may need some
refining and further explanation. If necessary, start with the brute force solution and improve
on it — just let the interviewer know that's what you're doing and why.
Practice - You won’t have access to an IDE or compiler during the interview so practice
writing code on paper or a whiteboard. Be sure to test your code and ensure it’s easily
readable without bugs. Don’t stress about small syntactical errors like which substring to use
for a given method (e.g. start, end or start, length) — just pick one and let your interviewer
know.
The Technical Phone Interviews

Your phone interview will cover data structures and algorithms. Be prepared to write around
20-30 lines of code in your strongest language. Approach all scripting as a coding exercise —
this should be clean, rich, robust code.
1. You will be asked an open-ended question. Ask clarifying questions, devise

requirements.
2. You will be asked to explain it in an algorithm.
3. Convert it to a workable code. Hint: Don't worry about getting it perfect because time
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is limited. Write what comes but then refine it later. Also make sure you consider
corner cases and edge cases, production ready.
4. Optimize the code, follow it with test cases and find any bugs.
The Coding & Algorithm Interviews

Coding - You should know at least one programming language really well, preferably C++,
Java, Python, Go, or C. You will be expected to know APIs, Object Oriented Design and
Programming, how to test your code, as well as come up with corner cases and edge cases
for code. Note that we focus on conceptual understanding rather than memorization.
Algorithms - Approach the problem with both bottom-up and top-down algorithms. You will
be expected to know the complexity of an algorithm and how you can improve/change it.
Algorithms that are used to solve Google problems include sorting (plus searching and binary
search), divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming/memoization, greediness, recursion or
algorithms linked to a specific data structure. Know Big-O notations (e.g. run time) and be
ready to discuss complex algorithms like Dijkstra and A*. We recommend discussing or
outlining the algorithm you have in mind before writing code.
Sorting - Be familiar with common sorting functions and on what kind of input data they’re
efficient on or not. Think about efficiency means in terms of runtime and space used. For
example, in exceptional cases insertion-sort or radix-sort are much better than the generic
QuickSort/MergeSort/HeapSort answers.
Data structures - You should study up on as many data structures as possible. Data
structures most frequently used are arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, hash-sets, hash-maps,
hash-tables, dictionary, trees and binary trees, heaps and graphs. You should know the data
structure inside out, and what algorithms tend to go along with each data structure.
Mathematics - Some interviewers ask basic discrete math questions. This is more prevalent
at Google than at other companies because counting problems, probability problems and
other Discrete Math 101 situations surround us. Spend some time before the interview
refreshing your memory on (or teaching yourself) the essentials of elementary probability
theory and combinatorics. You should be familiar with n-choose-k problems and their ilk.
Graphs - Consider if a problem can be applied with graph algorithms like distance, search,
connectivity, cycle-detection, etc. There are three basic ways to represent a graph in memory
(objects and pointers, matrix, and adjacency list) — familiarize yourself with each
representation and its pros and cons. You should know the basic graph traversal algorithms,
breadth-first search and depth-first search. Know their computational complexity, their
tradeoffs and how to implement them in real code.
Recursion - Many coding problems involve thinking recursively and potentially coding a
recursive solution. Use recursion to find more elegant solutions to problems that can be
solved iteratively.
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The Large Scale Design Interview
System Design - Questions are used to assess a candidate's ability to combine knowledge,
theory, experience and judgement toward solving a real-world engineering problem. In other
words, can a candidate "design policies, processes, procedures, methods, tests, and/or
components from ground up.
Sample topics include: features sets, interfaces, class hierarchies, distributed systems,
designing a system under certain constraints, simplicity, limitations, robustness and tradeoffs.
You should also have an understanding of how the internet actually works and be familiar with
the various pieces (routers, domain name servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc.). Other topics
include: traverse a graphs, run-time complexity of graphs, distributed hash table system,
resource estimation with real systems, big product design picture, translation of an abstract
problem to a system, API discussions, binary trees, cache, mapreduce, for loop problems,
index, reverse link-list, compilers, memory cache, networks and also common topics.
Operating Systems - You should understand processes, threads, concurrency issues, locks,
mutexes, semaphores, monitors and how they all work. Understand deadlock, livelock and
how to avoid them. Know what resources a process needs and a thread needs. Understand
how context switching works, how it's initiated by the operating system and underlying
hardware. Know a little about scheduling. We are rapidly moving towards multi-core, so know
the fundamentals of "modern" concurrency constructs.
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Resources
Books About Google

Cracking the Coding Interview Company - Google
Gayle Laakmann McDowell The Google story
Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Life @ Google
Your Next Job
John Mongan, Eric Giguere, Noah Suojanen, Noah Google Developers
Kindler Open Source Projects
Programming Pearls Github: Google Style Guide
Jon Bentley
Introduction to Algorithms
Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald
Rivest, Clifford Stein
Interview Prep Google Publications

How we hire The Google File System
Interviewing @ Google Bigtable
Candidate Coaching Session: Tech Interviewing MapReduce
CodeJam: Practice & Learn Google Spanner
Technical Development Guide Google Chubby
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Google Interview Prep Guide

What’s a Software Engineer (SWE)?

Why Google? Impact.

The Technical Phone Interviews

1. You will be asked an open-ended question. Ask clarifying questions, devise

The Coding & Algorithm Interviews

Books About Google

Interview Prep Google Publications

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