Friday, February 20, 2015

Google Internship Interview experience and a few updates

It has been a long time since I have written anything.  Welcome to 2015.  It has been nice, though I feel everyday as I am growing older, the pressure seems to be more and I have to update myself to handle the pressure in a comfortable way.  I am still learning it.

I visited India for 14 days in January/Feb.  It was a really late decision but surprisingly I managed to get ticket in a surprisingly low price.  I guess late January is the best time to visit India, both for a foreigner and a native.

The trip has been very refreshing but also invoked some weird feelings.  First of all, I lost my grandmother (thamma).  This is the first time I have witnessed death of a family member and also been to a cremation ground.  I tried to not think to much during that time as I knew if I dig deeper, more sorrow will emerge.  But still I could not hold my tears in sudden moments.  I do not want to go further into it.

Apart from that, this was after one and a half year I went home.  But I somehow felt a bit different in Kolkata.  The endless love and care from my family and known ones were overflowing, the time with my girlfriend and my parents seemed priceless but still the environment felt a bit too much for me (all the pollution and tropical weather) and I had a feeling anything more than 14 days would have been a problem.  I never thought that I would feel something negative like that for my homeland, oh well.

One more experience.  I was referred by the Google Munich people for a summer internship in Google.  I always wanted to experience an interview with Google.  Given the fact that they have one of the most grilling interviews among all the companies.  Though for an internship, only 3 phone interviews are done (as compared to the 7 interviews that are done for a software engineer position!), but still that was something I never experienced before.

All my interviewers were Indians, one from Google NY, one from Mountain view and the last one, I do not not, he did not tell me.  They will help you during the interview process, they do not care too much about the correctness of the code you write but about the algorithm and how you approach it.  You write your answers in a Google doc which is shared between you and your interviewer and the interviewer keeps it for reference.  I must tell, "Cracking the coding interview" is the best book you should read for a google "internship" interview.  The questions are VERY VERY similar.  Only my last interviewer was a fan of number theory (this was my worst interview, I gave a sloppy n^4 algorithm) and the questions were a bit difficult but first two interviews, I had above average performance due to reading the book.

I have to wait now for a week for the results.  I do not think I will get in but hey, it is the experience I wanted to have.

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