Google SWE Intern Phone Interview Questions

Interview process/preparation
#1

Hi!

I have 2 back to back technical phone interviews for Google SWE Internship this week and I was wondering if anything has recently gone through this process.

If so, would you kindly be able to provide the questions you were asked and its difficulty?

What topics should I really focus on while studying?

#2

hello! Google’s interviews tend to be quite comprehensive in the concepts that they may test on (DP, graphs, trees, heaps etc.). I would recommend instead of just doing as many lc problems as you can, focus more on noticing the patterns in medium/hard questions. Here are a few examples of recently asked questions:

  1. Removing leaves from tree similar to https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1203257/google-phone-interview
  2. Given an array, return array that is the stable sorted position of each element in the original array e.g. [2, 9, 3, 8, 7, 3] is sorted as [2, 3, 3, 7, 8, 9], output is then [1, 6, 2, 5, 4, 3].
  3. Box stacking problem like https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/540814/google-phone-box-stacking-problem
  4. You have a clock with the following functions: getCurrentTime(), advHour(), adv15min(), adv5min(), adv1min() (you can set it 1 minute ahead, 5 minutes ahead, 15 minutes ahead and one hour ahead).

And a time class to represent the time (12 hour with am/pm).
class Time {
int hour;
int min;
boolean am_pm;
}
Implement a function to set the clock’s time to a given time in the least amount of operations.
5. Rainwater https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/
6. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/363692/Google-or-Onsite-or-Shortest-Way-to-Form-Substring/329658

Hope this helps. Good luck!

#3

Thank you so much! This helps a bunch.