The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in Nov 2010
Interview
* Write iterator class encapsulating in-order traversal of a binary tree. What is a time complexity? What is a worst case?
* You have a collection of html documents grouped by a source web site . You need to count frequencies of bi-grams across all documents and present it in a sorted order (may be return top N frequent bi-grams). How would you approach it? How to filter out non-significant bi-grams? How to distribute and merge? What data structures to use to keep counters?
* OOP. Write classes representing expression tree for a simple calculator. You care only about constants and basic binary operators. Write function evaluating expressions.
* N clients - M servers. Each server can handle limited number of queries/sec. How to improve availability and performance ?
* Write code to shift a string with rotation [a, b, c << 2 = 2 c, a, b]
* How to count frequencies of characters in a string. What if the string is too huge? When is it reasonable to distribute across machines? How to find the most frequent character in the distributed scenario with a minimum data exchange between machines?
* You are given a huge stream of geo coordinates. Unordered. Return list of objects in a specified radius from some point X.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Count bi-grams in a huge collection of documents grouped by source web site.
The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google (San Bruno, CA) in Jan 2011
Interview
I applied for the youtube job on their website and got a call after a week from their recruiter HR. Initially the HR forwarded me the wrong job profile. The job profile was for team lead and I am a developer. She asked me to study python for interview. Few days later, the other HR mailed me confirming the date for phone interview. This time she forwarded the correct job profile.
The interviewer called after 10 mins of scheduled time. Intially she mistook me for some other candidate. There was no formal introduction or description of the role or project. She seemed busy and she directly asked me if I am willing to work on php or python and Mysql.
And then she proceeded with questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
How will you assign ACLs to users or groups? Theoritical discussion no code required.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in Jan 2011
Interview
Phone interview started off easy with basics of C++ since that is the OO Language of choice. Then it progressed into some really simple problem solving questions which is messed up but managed to solve a whole 10 minutes later after an awkward pause because of all the pressure of talking to Google, but i recovered later on in the data structures questions. If you come to think of it the problem solving question was part of an algorithm question too. I was too excited ... didn't sleep the night before, couldn't think straight and completely messed up. Moral of the story : Get plenty of sleep on the night before.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why did you Pick C++ instead of any other dynamic languages out there?