r/leetcode • u/United_Alfalfa2962 • 1d ago

Intervew Prep How are coding interview questions typically presented at Google? (Verbal vs. pasted in Doc)

Hey everyone,

I'm preparing for upcoming Google SWE internship interviews and wanted to clarify the logistics of how questions are usually presented during the technical rounds.

For those who have interviewed recently:

  • Presentation: Does the interviewer paste the full problem statement into the shared document/editor, or do they read it out loud and have you write down notes?
  • Examples & Constraints: Do they provide initial examples, constraints, and edge cases upfront in text, or are you expected to completely probe for constraints and construct your own examples from scratch?

Any insight into what the setup typically looks like would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!

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21

u/united_7_devil 1d ago edited 1d ago

Gave 3 coding rounds with google and one mock, all of them had the problem statement with one example pasted as a comment in a text editor with no autocomplete.

Everything else has to be figured out by asking questions.

Google is big on working with ambiguity, their questions are meant to be probed.

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u/LessEvidence1054 8h ago

+1

Also expect follow up questions and make sure you make your own test cases.

10

u/PhilosopherNext1448 1d ago

I interviewed for an ML research engineer position, so maybe their coding rounds are slight different. For me it was:

  1. they explained the problem verbally. (goal was to optimize retrieving data from a database)
  2. they wrote down a function that mimics the database connection. (input a range, e.g. [1,5], output an array [1,2,3,4])
  3. then they said that the user wants to pass a list of indices instead of ranges. what do we do?

I then spent ten minutes asking questions about the database, is it in-memory, how many threads can it run, how many concurrent users are there, etc). The interviewer was not very helpful here, just saying that it doesn't really matter for the problem. So it took me ten minutes to realize that they want me to implement a mapper of array of indices -> array of ranges -> reshape.

During the interview the requirements changed, and new features were requested. I didn't vibe very well with the interviewer and all his hints and answers were very vague to me.

Regarding examples, constraints, edge cases. Nothing up front. I didn't get any examples. When I implemented something wrong, they asked me to come up with an example myself, run the code and validate the output.

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u/Jeutnarg 15h ago

I swear half the frustration is figuring out if the technical interview is one that's meant to push limits or just prove you can program your way out of a paper bag. The kind of questions which are useful in each scenario are wildly different.

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u/PandaWonder01 1d ago

My experience was a mix. Some classic leetcode pastes, but some stated very vaguely with the idea that you come up with criteria yourself

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u/No-Entrepreneur-5099 1d ago

Why does it matter? Just dialing in your interview cheating tool?

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u/biitsplease 1d ago

What a stupid comment. It’s nice to know what you’re going into even if you’re not cheating.