Google Software Engineer Interview: Tackling Complex Chicken Relationship Problem

Software Engineering
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Google | Software Engineer | Interview Experience

Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Not specified
Difficulty: Not specified

Interview Process

The interviewer had over a decade of experience at Google. The questions were of a high level, requiring clear communication of the problem statement and the selection of appropriate data structures. The algorithms themselves were not particularly difficult.

Technical Questions

  1. Have Relationship Between Chickens
    Topics: Graph, Breadth-First Search, Depth-First Search
    Suppose you have a group of chickens, and you know the parent-child relationship for each chicken. Write a function to determine if there is a familial relationship between two given chickens.

    # Example function signature
def have_relationship(chicken1: str, chicken2: str, relations: Dict[str, List[str]]) -> bool:
    # Takes two chicken names and a dictionary of parent-child relationships,
    # returns whether they have a familial relationship

    relations = {
        "parent1": ["child1", "child2"],
        "parent2": ["child3"],
        # further definitions
    }

    have_relationship("chicken1", "chicken2", relations)

Tips & Insights

Focus on understanding the problem clearly and consider edge cases before jumping into coding.