[From MITBBS] Google Interviews Experience

Myself:
Definitely middle-aged.I am now over 40. I graduated long time ago. I am not
very successful in my career. My spoken English is BAD. I came from Canada 
to Bay Area six months ago with TN visa. I received a call from recruiter 2 
months ago, and started to prepare for interview. Had phone interview one 
month ago, and had onsite interview recently. 

Interview process
Phone Interview: Sparse Matrix Addition.

after this, I asked to schedule onsite interview one month later so I could 
have time to prepare.

I am interviewed for front-end position. onsite interview has 5 sessions. 
All of them are conducted by native-speakers. Four of them are front-end 
questions(html/javascrpt/css/web security) mixed with with some algorithms. 
One of them was system design(or data structure design). I did bad in this 
one.  This design question can be easily reduced to a tree construction/
traversal question. But I am so used to List/map in my daily coding. I didn'
t recognize that it is a tree problem.  Anyone will have this problem after 
he works after a while. Think how many time you use tree/graph in your daily
program. I used none. 


Lessons
I was given a mock interview by one developer manager in G家。He told me 
that each interviewer has about 3 or four questions in reserve. The 
interviewer will select one of them from his reserve to question applicant. 
Interviewer does not change his reserve unless some of them are exposed in 
internet and banned by company. Very useful information, isn't it?

he told me that the question should be relative easy and coding can be 
finished in 20 to 30 minutes. It does NOT test your knowledge in graph, etc.
So what does it test? It tests whether you can find a simple(or brute force
) solution and code them correctly. 1) finding simple solution is not easy. 
It really needs some intuition and luck. 2) He may not be correct since I 
saw so many graph and other algorithm questions in this board and leetcode. 

lesson 1: I was given some relative simple algorithm questions. two of them 
appeared in this board and leetcode. But I only started checking this board 
2 days before onsite interview. I didn't pay attention and think them over 
before interview. Luckily I have correct solution for them during interview.
  So the lesson is allocating sometime to go over the questions in this 
board or leetcode before interview! It could be helpful.

Lesson 2: you definitely don't need to remember how to construct red-black 
tree, suffix tree, max-flow algorithm. They are too complicated to fit in 
one interview session and couldn't test anything of the applicant. I spent 
about more than two weeks on them! What a waste!

Lesson 3: communication! I lack communication in the system design session. 
I rushed to coding. I only have about 3 to 4 eye contacts. Try to read the 
interviewer face expression to guess you are on the right track or not. 
Developer manager told me this. But I am really bad at this aspect. 

Lesson 4: interview for front-end engineer is easier than back-end or full-
stack engineer. It is my feeling.

This link is in the guide from recruiter: https://www.topcoder.com/community
/data-science/data-science-tutorials/. it is pretty good. If you have time, 
you can go over it. 

I can't point out what questions were asked since I signed NDA. I hope these
lessons are helpful to others.