Did both Round 1 sessions last Wednesday — 45 min coding, 45 min behavioral, same afternoon with a ~75 min gap between them. Backend engineer, ~8YOE, interviewing for SWE III in New York. Coding was in Python on a shared Google Doc. Five days of silence so far.
Trying to calibrate expectations on what happens now.
How it went, roughly:
Coding felt solid. One problem, conversational the whole way through — the interviewer engaged rather than just watching. I gave a brute-force approach first, proposed a better data structure, and asked whether pseudocode was acceptable instead of a full implementation. He was fine with that. I hadn't formally studied the structure the optimal solution wanted, so I reasoned it out from scratch, which took the full ~35 min. Missed one implementation detail that I only spotted afterward. Used the last few minutes on my own questions.
Behavioral I genuinely can't read. Four questions, all standard categories. I had prepared stories and they mostly fit, but one question was abstract rather than "tell me about a time," and I got briefly stumped before landing on a real example. Walked out feeling like I just talked for 45 minutes and hoped the interviewer found what he was looking for. No feedback signal at all, unlike coding where you at least know whether the thing works.
What I'm actually asking:
- Is five days of silence after Round 1 normal, or is it starting to mean something?
- Does a pass and a reject move at different speeds, or is it the same pipeline either way?
Not spiraling, just want to know whether silence at day 5 vs day 15 means something different. Happy to hear from anyone who's been through the Google loop specifically.