Interview Experience at Google Frontend: New York

Interview Experience
1

Located in Midtown Manhattan, New York.

  1. Attended two Google interview training sessions because of proximity to work. The training was helpful, providing insights on interview strategies for success. Key takeaways:
    — Most interviewees demonstrated strong algorithmic and system design abilities.
    — The success rate for receiving offers post-phone interview is actually quite high (as per the trainers).

  2. Failed the interview due to inability to answer any frontend questions. Applied for SDE role without realizing frontend knowledge was required.

  3. Deep frontend questions focused on stack/tree problems. Given that the DOM is essentially a tree structure, the focus was on constructing new DOM manipulation methods.

    1. Rewriting a DOM traversal function. Specific details are hazy as the question wasn’t fully understood at the time.
    2. Merging and modifying all classNames based on rules. For example, merging two ‘a’ classNames within a ‘wrapper’ and transforming ‘a’ to uppercase if it’s at the wrapper level.
    3. Algorithm: floor-cleaning robot.
    4. String operation: “1+(3-5)*7”, output the result.
    5. Final round involved a surprise question.

The interview for the position wasn’t as difficult as expected, but time constraints were a real challenge. In the first round, the interviewer spent 20 minutes on small talk and only allocated 10 minutes for the actual task. When I inquired about starting the task, he mentioned wanting to limit my time as the task was supposedly easy. Ironically, he took 5 minutes just to describe this “easy” task. With only 5 minutes left, I couldn’t complete the task. Goodbye.