Cracking Google’s Coding Challenge: Top K Products Design & Shoreline Insights

Software Engineering
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google | Full-Time | Interview Experience

Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Fail
Difficulty: Neutral

Interview Process

The interview consisted of 4 rounds of coding. The candidate faced original questions created by the interviewers rather than standard problems.

  • Initial Round: Find Shoreline

    • Problem: Given a grid with ‘w’ representing water and ‘x’ representing islands, print all the shorelines where water meets the islands.

  • Onsite Rounds:

    • Round 1: Given an IP address and a range of cities, determine which city the IP represents.
    • Round 2: Top K Products
      • Methods:
        • addNumber(int num): Add a number.
        • getProduct(int k): Calculate the product of the most recently added top k numbers.
    • Behavioral Questions: Discussed reasons for wanting to work at Google, handling conflict, and hypothetical scenarios regarding project management.
    • System Design: Design a monitoring system for a virtual machine environment.
    • Additional Round: Knight Moves
      • Problem: Starting from (0, 0) on an infinite chessboard, find the shortest distance to reach (x, y) using the knight’s movement. The candidate used BFS with a visited record, but the interviewer suggested it was not the optimal solution.

The candidate experienced difficulties with recruiter communication, including changes and rescheduling, which extended the interview timeline to October.

Technical Questions

  1. Find Shoreline (Depth First Search, Breadth First Search, 2D Array)
  2. Top K Products
  3. Design Monitoring System
  4. Knight Moves (Breadth First Search)

Tips & Insights

The candidate emphasized the importance of finding optimal solutions in coding rounds, as not achieving the best solution led to a negative outcome in their experience.