Prepare for Google with a focused mix of coding, design, and communication. Start with your job description and confirm the interview loop with your recruiter.
01 / MAKE YOUR NEXT SESSION COUNT
Return a binary tree in level order. Compare an iterative queue with recursion and test an empty tree and a long chain.
A correct traversal, bounded auxiliary memory, and a clear explanation of the trade-off.
Merge two sorted arrays. Then adapt your solution when one array has enough unused space to hold both. Explain how you avoid overwriting unread values.
A maintained invariant, correct boundary handling, and justified complexity.
Describe a technical decision you changed after receiving feedback. Explain your contribution and the outcome.
Specific actions, honest reflection, and measurable impact.
BEFORE YOU PRACTICE
Get the details that a generic company guide cannot know.
Company-linked challenges and related lessons from our library. Not a prediction of your interview.
Aggregated from candidate submissions and public sources.
Historical figures from existing records; date and location may be unspecified. Verify current ranges on Levels.fyi.
L3 · SWE II
$182,560
$121,029 base · $41,690 stock · $19,841 bonus
L4 · SWE III
$255,980
$147,683 base · $78,940 stock · $29,357 bonus
L5 · Senior SWE
$348,283
$178,805 base · $133,186 stock · $36,292 bonus
L6 · Staff SWE
$461,567
$206,367 base · $187,333 stock · $67,867 bonus
L7 · Senior Staff SWE
$625,529
$256,059 base · $286,176 stock · $83,294 bonus
23 reports from candidates who interviewed at Google.
Reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.
Work life balance can be what you want it to be on most teams. (Some teams are in more competitive sectors and require more crazy hours all the time - but very few of them). If you work 40 hour weeks without putting in anything extra,you'll fall behind them as they advance and you stand still - and maybe that doesn't matter, so it works out for everybody. But at least know where you would realistically stand. If you excel and work your butt off, you'll be compensated and promoted.
They take very good care of their people. Lots of challenging work. More manual work than expected. People feeling very entitled, even though they are very nice. Scale and complexity of most of their systems. A significant portion of the people are focused on promotion.
Excellent stock & bonus, if you live on your salary you'll be making some serious bank towards retirement. Competition both to get in and to get promoted is severe and steep. You'll be making slow progress, if any, towards goals of advancement in title and responsibilities.
Amazing people to work with, exciting technology, high impact work. For a company that is all about scale, its biggest problem is scaling to the # employees and the expanding breadth of scope. Some areas are very top heavy. Don't lose the engineering focused culture of trust and openness.
Perks and benefits are awesome. Great people there, I made some friends for life. Systems are overengineered to an extent that making progress is very slow and painful. It's part of the company culture at this point, so when new systems are created they typically suffer from the same problem. Prevent your teams from reinventing the wheel over and over again. Replace the bottom layers of the stack (Kernel, Linux distro, base system daemons) with upstream. Embrace OpenCompute for servers, racks and other DC components.
