Phone screen A chessboard was given where something could move based on some conditions... so dfs/bfs on a 2d array/graph. Not very straightforward, would rate it slightly hard. (harder than any of my onsite interviews) Completed within 25-30 minutes. Difficulty : Hard Verdict : Strong hire round 1 Medium level question based on cards, had to do some operations to check the input and return true/false. the question was a bit confusing because of the many conditions. The question was a 500 words essay and still left quite open ended. No proper input and output were given. 10 mins in the interview and I didn't even know that i had to just return boolean based on the input. Follow up was a difficult one. The interviewer again didn't give the question properly and was looking for some sort of subsequence and i thought she wanted a subarray, so was giving the wrong approach. Later, she explained a test case which made me realize she wanted a subsequence and i proposed a DP solution quickly and half coded it. Overall, this was a bad interview because of no clarity in questions. Solving both of these question on leetcode would take me 15 mins at max but, with the interviewer leaving the details out, things really messed up. So only way to tackle such interviewers is to clear out things as much as possible by asking questions at the start. Difficulty : Medium Verdict : Lean hire round 2 This was a very standard dp/backtracking question of a piece being able to move to its neighbouring cells in matrix and count the number of ways to reach destination. Had 2 follow ups. Discussed the different tweaks for follow ups, and it was quite smooth. First question took 15 mins and 20 mins for the follow-ups. Difficulty : Medium (towards easy imo) Verdict : Strong hire Round 3 This was sort of a string manipulation question where you had to return some part of the string. You basically just had to traverse through the string once and return the answer as per expectations. There were nice amount of if else and edge cases to be handled, so seemed like a nice question to me. Was able to code it quickly. Missed just one edge case, which i fixed with one line change. (must've taken 20 mins) After that was asked another question, for which the interviewer only wanted an approach and not the code. Explained the approach within 4 mins of she giving the question and I wanted to code it but she wasnt interested in it (prolly cause it was super easy). she asked a follow up on it and was able to answer it too. Difficulty : Medium (towards easy again) Verdict : Hire (Must have missed the SH cause of that one edge case, but I really wish the 2nd question was tougher, for me to make up for it) Googliness Standard questions that are asked in Googliness. Can be found on youtube videos. Wasn't even drilled with follow-ups on my answers. Was asked a lot of questions though and was able to answer them in detail within 30 minutes(spoke really fast). So had 15 mins to ask my questions. Was able to set a fun mood very easily. (Google's positivity is really a vibe for sure!) Difficulty : Easy Verdict : Strong Hire