Google Step Intern Interview Experience 2019

Google step is a program started by Google to give a chance to 1st and 2nd years girls or underrepresented community students mainly.

You can apply for Google steps in many ways. I have listed all of them bellow —
1. Google comes to your campus
2. through your Google WTM application
3. through Referral
4. through the application on the portal

In my case, Google came to my campus and asked us to submit our resume’s for the shortlist. All the 2nd-year girls from computer science and related branches were eligible to apply for it.

After about 1.5 months in January end, the shortlist came and a total of 10 girls were shortlisted from my college to give interviews. And to my surprise, I got shortlisted. The next day, we had a meeting with some people working in Google, they answered all our doubts related to interviews.

My interview was scheduled 5 days after the shortlist came. During that time, I revised all the coding related stuff I had done previously, notes made by me, practiced some questions and done the basic implementations of some data structures. Also, I practiced writing code on the doc as in the interviews we have to write code on google docs or something like that only.

Finally, the day of the interview arrived. In the 1st interview, the interviewer directly asked me the coding question, neither resume was discussed nor he asked for the introduction. He explained the question with some sample test cases. I asked a few clarifying questions as the question given earlier was a bit open-ended. Then I gave the brute force solution and tried to optimize it using various approaches, but I wasn’t able to optimize it. He gave few hints and we discussed many approaches and finally, after more than half an hour, I arrived at the optimized approach. then he asked me to code. I coded the solution but there was slight optimization left. After coding, we discussed that and after that, he said that the time is over and I can’t code that optimization.
After that, he asked me if I had any questions for him, I asked some questions and the interview ended.

My both interviews were back to back, so I had only 15 mins to rest and the question asked in the 1st interview was tough, so I was very nervous about the 2nd one. The question was based on BFS with hashing.

The 2nd interview started with my introduction followed by the interviewer’s introduction. After that, he asked me a coding question, resume was also not discussed in this one. The question was easy but there was some miscommunication in the question as the interviewer explained a different question and wrote the different one on the shared doc. there was a difference of “not” in the question due to which time was wasted, as we discussed some approaches.

After that, he asked me 2 more small questions for which I don’t have to code, just tell the approach. In the last, I was asked one more question and it was based on stacks and the question asked was also a bit tough. I tried to solve it using various approaches but didn’t get the right one and the time was over and the interview ended.

Verdict: I was not selected.