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Interview experience
Google · Software Engineer · Intern
Community-sourced A factual summary of an interview experience shared publicly outside interviewd.
Nov 1
Rejected
Overall Experience
A two-round Google 2027 summer software engineering internship process. The first round asked the candidate to merge two YAML-based trees with many merge rules, and the second asked for a knapsack-style selection problem. The first prompt was long and took substantial time to understand.
2 rounds
I
Posted by interviewdInterview Process (2 rounds)
Round 1 of 2: Coding / DSA
60 min
Question 1
MediumMerge two trees represented as YAML files, where each node has merge rules and many rules apply. The prompt and examples were long and took substantial time to understand.
Experience
The general approach discussed was depth-first search combined with rule matching. The candidate's full solution and the round's result were not reported.
60 min
Question 1
MediumA knapsack-style selection problem: there are item types, each with a quantity and a value, every item weighs 1, and the knapsack has a maximum weight W. Find the maximum total value that can be obtained.
Experience
The discussion favored a greedy approach over DP or DFS with a cache. The greedy approach is O(n log n), DP is O(n x W), and the optimal approach is quickselect at O(n).
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