Google Software Engineer interview experience

I remember getting hit with a lot of hard-style problem questions, and the day had a real “clarify and drive to the solution” vibe—some prompts were vague enough that I had to zoom in on the actual problem before coding. The interviewers pushed back on ambiguity and kept an eye on how I reasoned through the approach, not just whether the final answer worked.

Across the coding questions, the themes clustered around core data structures: stacks and strings came up, and there was also a backtracking/tree flavor. In one of the rounds I didn’t fully land the efficiency in a follow-up, and it