Interviewing at Google

How did it all begin?

I applied for the "Software Engineering Intern, BS, Summer 2025 - United States" position on October 8, 2024. The application slipped my mind until an xWF recruiter with an xwf.google.com domain emailed me on October 21, 2024, at 5:04 AM, asking for my graduation date to proceed with the next steps (OA and Snapshot). 5:04 AM—can you believe that? After waking up and seeing the email, I stopped working on everything—my projects, my classes—and started to intensely study DSA.

OA (Online Coding Assessment) & Snapshot Survey

 

Timeline

On October 24, 2024, at 12:11 AM (an interesting time choice again), Google sent me a link to the Online Assessment (OA) and the Snapshot Survey, along with explanations for both tests. They informed me that the OA and Snapshot Survey were due by October 30, 2024, at 11:59 PM, giving me six days to complete them.

 

OA

The OA consisted of two coding problems. While I can't share the exact questions due to legal reasons, both were equivalent to easy-level LeetCode problems, although not directly available on LeetCode. The first was a 2D Dynamic Programming problem, and the second was based on a Greedy algorithm.

I had 90 minutes to complete both questions but finished them in 40 minutes since they were straightforward and easy questions. My solutions were concise, with about 20 lines of code for the DP problem and 29 lines for the Greedy problem, all written in Go. There was no need to write test cases, as some were already provided.

 

Snapshot Survey

This section was non-technical and comprised behavioral questions. Each part contained around 10-15 questions that were very similar to one another. I believe the repetitive questions were intended to check for consistency in responses and to identify any contradictions or red flags.

 

Rejection

I submitted both OA and Snapshot Survey by October 29, 2024. After some time had passed, it was almost a week since I had sent the test, but there was no news. I was anxious, but I still thought I could get the second technical interview and showcase myself better, even though my solution set for both questions in the OA was already quite efficient. I spoke with three people on Reddit who applied for this position: two rejections and one who got the second interview. One of them was an Indian studying at UT Austin. He had previously interned at AWS and had a very good profile, but he was rejected. Although I didn't know much about the other person who was rejected, he said he was successful in both OA questions and had reached the final round for a position at Meta, which means his profile was also quite good. The person who got the second interview was a University of Alberta student without any notable experience. What made me even more anxious was that all three received responses from Google's xWF Recruiting Team within 4-5 days, and by the time I heard this, more than a week had already passed for me. And in the end, I was rejected. I can't make any comment about why I was rejected. Most likely, because I'm international and don't attend a very prestigious university, the people I was competing with had much more prestigious profiles.