hi everyone. This is Alextra, an Alpha software engineer at Google, and welcome back to the channel. Today, I want to talk about something that has been requested by a lot of you. In fact, I did a poll on LinkedIn, and this was the most popular voted topic that you all wanted me to talk about. No points for guessing, though; it is about how I prepared for my Google interviews. Let's get started straight away. [Music] [Applause] Before we deep dive into my preparation strategy, I want to talk a little bit about my circumstances before the interview. I was still a decent coder at that point in time, but I hadn't written a single line of lead code for at least over a year. I had no preparations in data structures and algorithms. That freaked the hell out of me. In fact, the last time I had written any code was during my internships, which was also at least three months ago. The code I wrote in my internship, like everyone else does in the internship, was mostly influenced by Stack Overflow and GitHub.

so that in no way is a decent precursor to an interview preparation. That, coupled with the fact that I was able to negotiate only three weeks of preparation time for my first round of interviews, was something that also scared me. Now, I know a lot of people might say that, Hey, being able to negotiate at least three weeks is also a good thing, but at that point of time, that sounded too little to me. Google had always been hyped to me as something that is too difficult to be done. In fact, I remember first year when I joined college, my seniors were like, If you are able to crack Google after three to four years of work, even you still did a great job. And me thinking to be able to do it in just three weeks of preparations was something that I thought was like a stupid idea at that point of time. I had even given up thinking by me, but I managed to motivate myself just by thinking that if I'm able to crack through the phone interview, then I will

be get the opportunity to visit a Google office for the onsite, and that to me was a dream come true. Alone to know about how all of that experience went though. I did recently upload a video on my entire Google interview experience. Check it out. I will in fact link it in the description below and add a link somewhere the i icon above. So the most beneficial decision in my interview preparation journey would easily be to avoid using an IDE. Let me explain to you why. My recruiter had clearly communicated to me that I needed to write production standard code during my interview. What this translated to me was my code should not only be working code, that is, it should not only just be syntactically accurate and logically accurate, but it should also follow proper coding practices. It should be a clean code. It should have good variable naming. It should follow right coding convention. It should be properly indented. Things like these, right, that you expect in a proper code. An IDE would definitely not help me achieve that cost.

the reason is very simple. IDs have a lot of features. They have auto-complete, auto-fulfill, auto-recommendation. There are a lot of plugins, linters, that help your code basically auto-format themselves. That, coupled with things like GitHub Copilot, which come in as a plug-in, and a lot of these things practically write half of your code for you. These are great for you when you're writing your own projects and stuff, but for an actual interview, this could be a deal breaker in your preparation. I wanted to write every word, every letter of my code on my own so that I was consciously making a choice on what I was writing. For that purpose, I use Sublime. Now, the only reason I chose Sublime instead of using Google Docs, which would ideally be my recommendation, write a code on Google Docs when you're practicing for a Google interview. But I use Sublime for the basic reason that it had an auto-indent feature that I really wanted because I have OCD for indentation, and I did not want to keep

indenting my code on Google Docs all the time, especially because Google Docs has a lot of font and consistency and stuff, which I actually faced during my interview as well. But I did not want that to be something that wasted time in my preparation. To cut it short, don't use an IDE; use a text editor you like. My recommendations go: if you are very serious and want to be extremely cautious, use Google Docs; that's the best and safest choice. I use Sublime; you could use something like Notepad++ as well. Avoid using LeetCode's own text editor because it has the autocomplete feature. For example, right, what I did was I wrote my code on Sublime and copy-pasted it on LeetCode to run and see if things worked or not, and that worked like a charm. The second thing I wanted to talk about was how I navigated my topic, what I wanted to prepare, what I needed to prepare, that stuff, right? Like I mentioned, I just had three weeks, so I needed to be very careful about it. So, my first priority

was being able to write correct code. So, what I did was I firstly picked up all the data structures right and all the algorithms that I was aware of. I broke them out into directories, like empty directories, obviously. I basically started picking up topics, and then I thought easy questions, right? So, the way I did it was I picked up topics like linked lists, trees first, which are, in my opinion, they have a set of questions and a limited set of questions that don't coincide with other data structures easily. So, you want to get a linked list question that overlaps with an array question very easy. The only question that I practically know of that uses a linked list with another data structure is merging k sorted linked lists, which uses a priority queue. But besides that, most linked list questions that I know can just be solved using your basic coding practices. Similar with trees, most trees questions, at least on an easy level or a medium level even, could just be solved by recursion. So, I picked topics like these, and this helped me in doing two things, right? Get

function and influence with writing C++. This code again. I did give my interviews in C++. I had not written C++ code in a while. My internships, I used Python and Java. Before that, I had done all my coding, all my data structures, and received this list. So, obviously, C++ was my language of choice but also the language I was most likely out of touch with. What I did, I picked these topics, solved the easy questions, and went into arrays and strings, right? Arrays and strings, in my opinion, is a very vast area of topic, like everything, searching, sorting, greedy questions, a lot of questions that overlap with priority queue and stuff, stacks, queues, all of these questions can easily be corrected, right? As a Hey, this is a question, this is a string question, which is not something I wanted. So, I went into the algorithm section of things. I practiced binary search questions, I practiced sliding window questions, I practiced two-pointer questions, I practiced DP questions, and so on and so forth. So, like, I basically picked a topic that easy question in the

category and note why I did easy right. Like, I could solve these questions. I already mentioned I was still a decent quota. I could obviously solve these questions, but I could easily eliminate small mistakes I was making. I missed out initially initializing variables, for example. When I first wrote these codes, I was easily missing out on very basic edge cases, right? Empty array, but what should I do if I'm inside mtra, for example? So, things like those get up to speed with my time complexity analysis. So, easy questions are a very good way of doing three things. It makes you confident again. It makes you work on your silly mistakes, especially the things that you write while you write code. It definitely ramps you up with the language. You don't need to solve the hardest question out there to get fluent with sleeplessness again. You do see easy questions, and you would see how easily you ramp up with the language, and that was my strategy. I don't do it for a lot of days. I guess this was the first two to three days. The good thing

about easy questions is right because you can solve them quickly and easily. Like, that's right, they're called easy. You can do a lot of them. So, in the first three days, I ended up doing, I guess, around 80 or 70 easy questions, which is okay. That's a lot of questions, right? I'm not very comfortable in writing C++ code. The next step is to pump up the level, do medium questions, and do a lot of medium questions. In my opinion, when it comes to any company, the majority of the questions that they can ever ask fall under the medium bucket. A company sometimes asks you hard questions. If you are very lucky, they might ask you an easy question, but they would always most probably ask you a medium question. In fact, the guidance for my interview was that you would most likely get two medium-level questions, or one easy and one hard question, or one medium question followed up by another medium to hard question, which is like the worst case, in my opinion, that could happen, like according to my recruiter. That could happen to you, so I was like, Okay, I need

to solve medium questions fast because there's this entire angle of actually explaining your logic, bringing clarity and everything. I need to be good at medium questions than fluent and medium questions. So, I did all of that. Another section of topics was graph, right? Like graph has a lot of concepts, like there's obviously the extra BFS we honor. Then there are things like the A* algorithm. There is a kind of chord. There's so many algorithms, but let's just pick A*. Right? A* is not an easy algorithm and not something that will ever come in a Google interview. I was very particular about things like these, right? Like the guidelines strictly stated that you needed to practice basic data structure questions, the realm of basic data structures, the questions that fall into that category. And I also confirmed this with a few other people, and no one had ever faced a question that strictly required them to use segment trees, for example, right? So, I made sure that I was very focused on the category of questions I was doing. When it came to graph, I did questions based off only four.

concepts. I did BFS. I did DFS. I had Dijkstra as a topological sort. And the reason I picked these topics was because they are the only topics I could find questions from. Trees. I did recursion and recursion alone, and BFS-based questions, and nothing else, and obviously the pre-order traversal, in order to answer questions. But yeah, those questions for aries. I did a lot of DP. I did sliding window, two pointers, finally search. In fact, I was going through a lot of interview experiences at that point of time, and my research was such a common topic that I doubled down on it, making sure that I was really good on my research question, things like those. So, figuring that was my strategy, and I did medium questions for roughly two weeks after that, and only after that, like my first two weeks of the three weeks, was medium and easy questions. Last week, I was drilling down on some of my selected hard questions. Now, how I'm selecting those questions, I would obviously come back to a later part of the video. For now, that's basically what I did.

selected some hard questions and some topics, and then I did. So, it was a basic V to navigate around what I'm going to do. If you want to know more about that navigation process, what you could do is I have a GitHub repository with all the questions that I practice, at least all the questions that I wrote and practiced. I'll post the link for that as well in the description below, and you can check it out. Before we move forward, let me tell you about Newton's schools. Newton's school gives you a chance to upskill yourself and take your tech careers to the next level, irrespective of your background. Newton school provides you an opportunity to compete to work at some of the top tech companies out there. They have already had 1500 students placed, and the number just keeps growing. They have multiple programs, irrespective of your background. The program that I personally like the most is the program for freshers. The program has a pay-after-placement policy, which ensures that you don't need to give any money upfront and only pay after you're placed in the company.

associated with 600 plus partner companies and have a 90 percent placement rate, which assures you that you are in safe hands. To know more about Newton's school, feel free to check the description below. So, interview experiences are a very important part of any preparation strategy, and so they were an important part of mine as well. The resource I used for this was LeetCode Discuss. Now, LeetCode Discuss has a lot of lead coders; a lot of people who basically use that platform do put on the Google interview experiences. I basically went there and I searched for these experiences. I read through them. It was an important point that also helped me navigate through topics, right? Like I just mentioned that I doubled down on binary search because you saw it happen a lot in these interview experiences. For example, that was an important part of my preparation strategy. Look into interview experiences, see what's happening a lot, use that in your questions, your choice, and the topics you focus more on, and that stuff. For example, I decided in the first five days that I don't need to do

any linked list after a point of time because they're hardly a rarely asking test question, so that's like a basic conclusion that I could easily derive. One important thing that I did by navigating through questions based on that interview experience was don't look at interview experiences from two years, three years back, right? Like those interview experiences are very old for a company like Google, which refreshes questions a lot frequently. The way I did it was I sorted the interview experiences. Like I went to elite co-discuss, opened the search bar, wrote Google interview questions, sorted it from newest to oldest, and then I basically went page by page. And these interviews were happening in 2019, I guess September 2019, October 2019. So I've meant to look as back as January 2019. That's the furthest, probably event that was the range. Like I would look from the beginning of the year till today what Google had been asking. Because Google is such a big company, they have way too many interview experiences on

the platform and from everywhere. Like, I found interview experiences from people who are in the US, people who are in India, people who are in Europe, people who are in Japan, Taiwan. Like, all these people are putting in the interview experiences, and you would find, obviously, like, if you take a one-week period, you will often find that, okay, there are questions repeating during that period, and those questions never occurred again. Like, after a point of time, you could see that Google does not tend to repeat older questions a lot, but the more recent questions have a possibility of repeating. Like, that was my conclusion at that point of time, and I stick to it. So, I was more focused on the more recent questions. That was my strategy around interview preparations using interviews. One last thing that I did was mock self-interview, which is a very weird thing to say. What I did was I basically picked one up, and this is something I did a lot during my last week, was I used to pick these interview experiences. I used to open them, and they were well-detailed, right? Like, the person came, the person

asked this question, and they followed with this. I basically used to question myself along those same lines, like, Hey, you are given this question. What would you say to the interviewer? How do you expect the interviewer to respond? And based on different responses, how would you act? How do you react? That was more of my way of preparing for an interview, using an actual Google interview script, and like that was how I treated that experience. One more thing that I mentioned, like how did I pick those hard questions, like I did practice a lot of hard questions. I'm pretty sure I practiced roughly at least 30 to 40 hard questions. And how I picked those hard questions was I used the interview experiences to realize which concepts are more frequently asked or more recently asked at that point. I guess craft was one of them, TV was one of them, at my research. And what it did was I went to these concepts, saw the more popular hard questions that used to come, and the hard questions that have come for Google, and I wrote the solutions for

those questions. I practiced them thoroughly, and that was how interview experiences helped me a lot. Like, they were the major hack I used for my Google interview preparation, hands down. So, do look into interview experiences only; it could discuss whenever you have a Google interview. In fact, to be honest, any interview coming up now. Last but not the least, the most important attribute for an interview are your soft skills. How you communicate your solutions, how you present things, how you talk things through, how you act when you are stuck, how you discuss things through, like everything around that. For all of those things, I was not at all prepared, hands down. That was something I was worth at that point of time, and the reason was very simple. Like, I had given just one interview prior to that. That was my Samsung internship interview. That was literally my entire court of interview experiences. Directly being told that after your internship interview, the first interview that you're going to give is a Google interview, was like, How do I handle it? For me, this is how I did.

it right. Like, I wanted to give mock interviews a lot, but I could not because I could not find the resources. I wasn't aware of any at that point of time. I did not know people who did those stuff. And to be honest, if any of you are giving your interviews now, I would highly recommend giving mock interviews. There are a lot of people on LinkedIn who offer their services around that. There are platforms that offer that. A lot of these platforms exist. You could just Google search, and you will find them. Do give more interviews. Very strong recommendations. How I went about, like, my substitute more interviews was this YouTube channel called interviewing.io. What they do is basically they have sessions. I don't know what to call them, sessions or something, but they simulate a market. They simulate an interview, right, and they solve questions for that interview. And it's very interview-like. You could check that channel out. It's amazing. I basically went through how everything started, that channel, right. I used to see videos on that one video on

that channel listen to the question, think about, Hey, this is what my next response would be. Play the video and see what that person who gave like and what, in my opinion, that point was. The ideal interview responded and see how the interviewer said. And then I think that, Okay, what would I say? I used to pick up qualities from there, and this is what my character in an interview should be like. Interviewing thought I was not the only site that I consulted. There was Clement. Clement is a very popular YouTuber, exists, but at that point of time, he used to make a lot of content around Google. I used to watch a lot of that stuff, and that was a big inspiration for me at that point of time. I used to see a channel not only for motivation, but he didn't simulate a lot of Google interviews on this channel at that point of time. And I used to look at them and like pick qualities, pick traits from them. Last but not the least, Google actually puts out resources of its own.

Google had sent me a mail with preparation material, and while most of the material was useless, it had a workshop recording which they sent, which was a workshop that they had done somewhere in Hyderabad, helping students out, and that they talked about how you should prepare for a Google interview. I'm pretty sure if you look it up on YouTube, that Google interview workshop or something, you could find some resource around that and the good resource for interview, like looking into how to give an interview, like a lot of YouTubers make content on, Hey, this is how you should answer in an interview, okay? This is how you should ask questions, three advices on how you should give an interview, right? Don't jump into a solution, ask clarifying questions to try it in your solution, very three BC solution. When you try running a solution, you find your own mistakes. When you don't jump into a solution, you give an interview an opportunity to discuss things. You don't skip any edge cases very easily. Having a conversation with an interviewer is

always a good idea. I guess those are my top three advices, but there are a lot better resources that I found on the internet at that point of time, and you can do so. Yeah, have a look out for that. Before we close this video, I want to summarize the entire preparation strategy and do like three simple points. I had three weaknesses that I wanted to work on. One, I wanted to work on writing better code because at that point of time, I used to write horrible code in my opinion. Most of my code was usually copy-pasted from a lot of websites and templates and stuff, so that was something I used to do a lot. Using a text editor to always write my code for those next three weeks was like the best thing I could have done for myself. It made it much better and much easier for me to translate logic into code, which was like 50% of the credit of succeeding in my interview was to that. The second thing would be confidence. I was very low on confidence. I thought that

My basic foundation of coding was crumbled at that point of time, and easy questions separate that like believe me or not. Doing easy questions for the first three days of my preparation and like just focusing on them helped me revise everything that was there, everything that I wanted to be practiced. It strengthened my foundation to a great degree, and it gave me a lot of confidence. But I was able to solve a lot of questions. I was only getting correct answers, guys. If I have turned on LeetCode, and even if I got stuck on a question, it wasn't for long. So, that's a lot of confidence that suddenly came into me that, Hey, I can do this. Maybe I can do this, right? Like, that confidence helps a lot, especially when you're preparing for a company, that kind of a dream company at that point of time. Like, last but not the least in any week is the art of interviewing. I am very bad at giving interviews, and he's at that point of time. I was, I had given only one, and I did not know how to do better, so I

basically navigated a lot of interviews that other people had given and picked soft skills from there. Tried to adopt that into how I answered. I read interview experiences like a script, like hey, this is what happened in the interview. Just imagine this: you was answering these questions and trying to mock that interview in my own head. Doing all of this made it much easier for me, like not much easier, but made me more confident about myself by giving the interview. Made me more assured that I might be actually able to get something out of this. Overall, gave me a better shot at Google, and I was able to convert that opportunity into a full-time job, as you all know today. So if you have any other questions related to this entire preparation strategy, feel free to drop it in the comments. You also want to share your own Google interview preparation strategy or your own Google interview experience, also drop that in the comments. Very active in the comment section of it. Do like and share this video with anyone you know, and subscribe to the video also.

hit the notification bell because I try to post videos twice a week nowadays. I would be very happy if you get notified as soon as those videos are out. Do check out Newton's school in the description below. I have also linked my greater video and my Google interview experience down there, so do check that out as well. So yeah, see you later, bye. [Music] You

How I prepared in 3 weeks for my Google Interview? | My Google Interview Preparation strategy

How I prepared in 3 weeks for my Google Interview? | My Google Interview Preparation strategy