Google Phone Screen Experience

Recruiters

I wanted to share my personal experience with Google’s phone screen for the L4 SWE role at Google. I had applied several times to Google before for different relevant engineering roles but haven’t received any reach back. I even got a referral once but nothing… But as I was very motivated to get swe job at Google, I kept applying. For anyone struggling with the same I recommend you to stay positive with yourself and persevere.

At some point I received an email from Google’s recruiter asking if I was interested in their L4 swe role. I scheduled a call with her links and we briefly discussed if I was a match. I indeed was and I soon had an upcoming Google phone screen.

Preparation

I studied computer science at university. What helped me with algorithms and data structures was more about my personal efforts on problem solving. I used to regularly study theory and try them on problems at leetcode, hackerrank, etc. Watched youtube walkthroughs and asked my friend for mock interviewers. I still didn’t know about professional mock interview platforms so I looked for mock interview “buddies” and we helped each other.

Google Phone Screen

The phone screen interview at Google started as expected. I had read, asked around and watched a lot about it before. I was interviewed by an Asian guy. He was younger than me, wasn’t rude, rather leaning more towards nice. He seemed slightly distracted during the interview but it wasn't a bad experience. He briefed me on an agenda for what the next ~40 minutes would look like and moved on quickly to the Google coding question he had prepared - saying it would leave me with more time. I was still excited and a bit nervous…

The coding question he asked was about a binary tree. I cannot disclose the exact problem statement but it would be somewhere in-between leetcode medium to hard. I clarified the question and started talking about the ideas on how I would solve this. This was my first experience with Google. Going well. Eventually, after back and forth with the problem, I came up with a solution, shared my evaluation of time and space complexity and asked him whether I should implement it. I had spent about 15-17 minutes by then. I coded it up and started testing my code with an example - at this point the interviewer got more active as well. He was chiming in and asking questions. When I was done I said my solution was correct as it worked with examples I tested it against. After that, he gave a test case which was failing my solution. I corrected the bug and said I was done, again. I still had about 3-4 minutes left.

At this point, he pointed me to my prior examples… Looks like I had introduced regression when I corrected the bug he found. I skipped the part of re-testing my code after I fixed the bug.

Then he said we were done and that the recruiter will let me know about the outcome of this phone screen interview.

Google Phone Screen Outcome

You guessed probably right that they rejected my application at that time and encouraged me to retry after several months. While this was an amazing experience which helped me grow and become better both at interviews and at work it was still a regretful one. Later, I learned only 10% of people get offer at their first trial in FAANG+ companies.

I might post later about how I got offers from Google twice after this (after 1.5 and 3.5 years after this phone screen).

Google's Phone Screen Tips:

• be fluent with coding language of your choice - would be pity to fail when you have optimal solutions but struggle to code it
• always ask clarifying questions
• alway proactively evaluate time complexity and space complexity
• persevere - if you keep trying you will go over the edge and start getting offers from the giant tech companies. And once you’re in then recruiters reach out much easily

Good luck ;)