It is evident these days that Google has started its drift from their vintage image of extremely talented and humble professionals with a near perfect interview process to the more common tech pools of mediocre engineers who work hard to get into google more than just talent. The recruiters (phd interns) felt like they had to carry out the interviews and scheduling forcefully amidst the thousands of applications they receive. The interviews were so standard to an extent, I sometimes wonder how would they differentiate between a person who really has a good problem solving and thought process and someone who has practiced those questions for hundreds of hours to just game the system.
The last interviewer went to an extent as to say he was volunteering because google had asked him to, so he pretty much had no interest in how interviews would be evaluated or whether a candidate is interested (implicitly telling to not ask questions about the internship role and stuff).
The process from resume submission to rejection took 3.5 months for a phd internship position. Just reflect on whether it is even worthwhile for a phd in the midst of its research program to dedicate this much time for a rejection for an intern role and for a role where he/she would at the end be matched to a generic project. (could be worthwhile if you have no other options in case your phd project prospects in industry are not good)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked to reverse engineer and explain a python code (written by the interviewer on the google doc) - essentially was a cycle detection algorithm - then told to convert it to c++ code.
Home exam, 2 questions in 90 mins
Then they did 2 interviews-45 mins each
It was on google meet
The interviews are in English, the first question was matrix dfs and the second one was hashmap with random function
There were multiple stages to the process, but the main one of which was technical interviews through digital meetings (Zoom) consisted of 2 meetings, in which you have to solve 1 leet-code style question, levels medium-hard.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google (Tel Aviv)
Interview
My application process started in November with two LeetCode-style home assignments. In December, I sat for two technical interviews on Google Meet. Although they were meant to be back-to-back, one was rescheduled after the interviewer didn't show up. I successfully navigated a medium question with a follow-up and a hard DFS/graph problem.
Two weeks later, in January, I moved into the host-matching phase. After one team match interview in February, I wasn't selected, and by April, I received a final update that the process was closing because no further team matches were found.
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