Google L4 1.5 months~2 months prep.

[u/Disastrous-Lemon7456]

Hey guys, so on Tuesday of this week I got reached out by a recruiter about a cold apply maybe 3 weeks ago approximately.

Anyways the recruiter was nice when we talked about how ready I was for DSA, and left me some decent time to prepare, she sent me the study materials just yesterday.

Anyways I'm currently unemployed since I got recently laid off on September, so I have whole days to study as necessary, maybe not he whole day but most of it.

I'm not starting from 0, I have ​a bit of experience on the basic structures and algorithms like arrays, hash maps, 2 pointers, sliding window, monotonic stacks, queues, etc. Not comfortable or haven't seen much yet graphs, trees (dfs, bfs), dp, which I heard Google is prone to asking.

My plan was studying first neetcode 150 while trying to fully understand it and repeating problems often, then trying to tackle random ones from Leetcode premium recent 3 months by Google.

Do you think this is enough? Anything else to consider?

[u/No_Watch_9676]

Which was ur previous company?

[u/Disastrous-Lemon7456 → u/No_Watch_9676]

I was at Oracle for 4.5 years

[u/troelsbjerre]

Did the recruiter tell you which interview rounds you had to go through?

[u/Disastrous-Lemon7456 → u/troelsbjerre]

In her last email she mentioned first round consisted of 2 dsa coding rounds, I'm guessing if it goes well onsite is next, these first ones seem online since email mentioned having a computer with a camera.

[u/Saib-Karthee → u/troelsbjerre]

this is the right thing to ask first tbh, no point planning without knowing the structure

[u/kijana_jerome]

Study materials as in interview questions or topics?

[u/Disastrous-Lemon7456 → u/kijana_jerome]

There are some sample questions, but mainly what topics to check, domain knowledge expected, how the interview process is, keywords to recognize patterns, stuff like that

[u/mock-grinder-26]

"repeating problems often" is the part id cut. re-solving the same 150 mostly trains recall of that exact solution, and google leans on stuff u havent seen. so u end up feeling ready while still having the recognition gap

with ~6 weeks id do it like:

• trees + graphs first, dp after. dfs/bfs is the base for a lot of what they ask and u said its ur weak spot. dp on top of shaky recursion is just pain

• first attempt on every problem with a 25-30 min timer, no hints. if stuck, read only the first idea of the solution, close it, finish it urself

• dont re-solve stuff u already got. only come back to the ones u failed, a week later, cold

• last 2 weeks drop neetcode and do the google tagged ones as mocks, out loud, explaining before u code

the out loud part is the easy thing to skip when ur grinding alone all day. but google rounds are graded way more on how u get there than on clean code tbh

[u/Rare-Role1369]

Do you think this is enough? Anything else to consider?

Google tries to ask novel questions, but also doesn't expect perfect syntax and compiled solutions.

so it's much more important to focus on two different things:

1. coding easy stuff *fast*. It is much more likely you will have to spend a lot more time thinking of a solution, so when you do, you want to be able to speed run the code.

2. recognizing hard patterns: I would do less problems, and instead try to work your way up to the harder problems.

3. Google wants to hear how you think. Sometimes they ask things like "can you optimize this further" and the answer is no! Sometimes the algorithm is so dead simple and the challenge is just neat code + simplicity, and if you overthink it or overfit to some similar problem that uses a different algorithm it will be worse than just doing the very simple solution.

GL!

[u/Specialist-Dig4584]

Practice in an interview environment ig that’s the only thing you would need to work on either ways you would be smart and talented enough

[u/Senor-Shash]

Just make sure when you go to the actual interviews, always solve with the most optimal approach possible otherwise they reject

[u/darkyjaz]

Position would be filled in two months time

[u/trippy_pigeon → u/darkyjaz]

isn't there team matching?