6 min read
This morning I woke up at 7 with gut-wrenching anxiety. I think total I must have gotten 6 hours of sleep last night. I obsessively checked over the 50+ pages of Google doc code from October/November the night before and reviewed the basic data structure APIs (HashMap, ArrayList, Stack, Queue, etc...).
I still have this relentless cough and coupled with nausea, every time I coughed I would gag at the end. I had to explain to a few people that I actually wasn't sick, I just had a lingering cough and extreme anxiety. Googlers really don't like it if you're in the office sick and almost throwing up since we have unlimited sick time and germs spread fast with several thousand people in a single building. Not like I had much of a choice anyway since I already had rescheduled my interviews once and they had to be onsite.
"Are you okay?"
One FTE from the team came in around noon and asked if we wanted to get lunch at 1 but I couldn't since I had interviews then. I only had a smoothie for lunch and didn't even drink all of it because I felt so nauseated. I had no interest in talking to anyone either so I probably would have declined even if I was hungry.
A little after 12:30 I got a coffee even though I didn't want to drink it. Right after, I decided to go actually find the room since it was on the 10th floor, which I'm the least familiar with of all the Google floors. Every time I took another swig of coffee it almost came back up, but I told myself I needed to drink it anyway.
Eventually I found the room and sat on a couch nearby probably looking like someone sitting in an ICU waiting room (maybe minus the coffee). I had to throw a third of the coffee out since I was certain another swig would have brought it all back up. I couldn't enter the room even 5 minutes early since someone was on GVC for some reason which didn't really seem like an interview since they were just talking with someone in another office.
Right at 2 my interviewer showed up and we waited for the other two to finish their meeting. The interviewer said that there would be no tricks like that weird bit-twiddling one where you can reverse the bits in an array in logn time even though there are n bits. I was still skeptical.
I didn't get to discuss what I did during my internship at all, we just got started on the problem. I've done 8 mock interviews (at least half with real questions) in the last few weeks and filled up almost an entire notepad with handwritten Java for practice, but of course the real thing was nothing like the mock interviews in terms of difficulty. The process was the same but the question was one of those "either you know the exact data structure that would make this problem stupidly easy or you're in trouble". So as advice to anyone thinking about interviewing here, yeah you might need to know <some obscure data structure that was never even covered in any of your classes and you've never actually used before because it's useful only in rare cases> . (Actually, the two FTEs on my team who I talked to right afterwards didn't know/remember what this data structure even was and had to look it up.)
Out of luck I knew the exact data structure but 1.) I had never implemented it and 2.) I never even used it before. So that was fun as I jumbled the classes on the board trying to write all the functions and drew arrows all over the board and confused myself and probably the interviewer too. But at least I had the right idea... I think. Interviewers are hard to read, probably on purpose.
That one ran a little but over so I lost some break time. I was glad I scheduled a 15 minute gap so I had some time before the next guy showed up. This time I actually got to talk a little about my project and then we got started a couple minutes early. The problem seemed simple until it was written on the board. Then it just kept going downhill since I couldn't figure out how not to make it exponential time.
My mental reaction for most of the interview as I tried to maintain a poker face
I know after the fact out of obsessing over the problem for hours that I could have done it in subquadratic time but of course that failed to dawn on me when it actually mattered. At least I told the interviewer I knew there was a way to optimize it but I never had the time to after 2 modifications to the initial problem were made by the interviewer and I had to describe how I'd modify my code.
After it was over I walked like a zombie to the subway microkitchen on the 4th floor to get something to drink and eat since none of the cafes were open after the interviews ended. Some unidentified Googler came up from behind and asked if I was going to the Guac-Off upstairs but I just shook my head and kept drinking. They asked if everything was okay but it didn't matter since interviews were already over with so I just said everything was fine and stuffed my face with some M&Ms.
I went up to the rooftop for an hour and just sat there hoping some fresh air would help but it didn't. I hung around until dinner, which I didn't even eat much of since I didn't feel well and left right afterwards. I still don't feel good even after a long nap. I guess I can at least be happy that I don't have to study anymore... which actually was mostly pointless in hindsight. I'm actually really angry because it seems the other interns who had interviews before me had an easier time/problems.
Tomorrow's my last day so besides getting another massage with my remaining points and turning in my laptop and badge, I don't really know how I'm going to spend the day. It's going to be crappy out so probably nothing that involves leaving the office. In that case I might just explore more of the building and take pictures of cool stuff that I haven't gotten the chance to yet.
NOTE: DO NOT ask/nag me about if conversion went successfully because I have no idea when I'll hear back about that so you'll likely end up only making me angry. Also DO NOT ask me what the questions were because that's confidential information.