Signed a Google offer. Here's my analysis

**Background** This is my second time interviewing with Google. The first time I couldn't solve 4/5 questions. Education: BS YOE: 1.5 years Target level: L3 Interviews: 1 screen + 3 coding + 1 googleyness Interviewers Location: Mountain View Leetcode questions done: 277 Total (58E 189M 30H) **How I prepared** * Neetcode 150 * Leetcode company questions list * Mock interviews with friends * Mock interviews with Google engineer **Results - yes, you can ask recruiter for results** * screen - hire/pass * coding - 1 strong hire 2 hire * Googleyness - not a psycho **What I Learned** * L4 is significantly harder than L3. L3 questions are usually L3/L4 level questions with less follow ups and need for attention to details. L4 questions are either L3/L4 level questions with a lot more follow up or need for perfection, or L4/L5 level questions where a lot of them are kinda cracked. * Googleyness doesn't really matter if your coding rounds were wack, or great. As long as you prepare for the most common behvioral questions, you are fine. * Strong hire doesn't mean complete perfection. Messed up the time complexity a bit and a small int vs. string conversion bug but still got strong hire. * Hire doesn't mean need to finish follow ups (at least for L3). * Communication is how you get hire/strong hires. * Write code as if it's going into production. Interviewer, hiring manager, and hiring commitees review your code, so treat your code as if it's going into the Google codebase. * Don't interview too slowly if you don't want to spend three months team matching. The original position I interviewed for was taken and I had to team match for three months. * Make sure to prepare for each team match. I got lazy and that's why I was rejected by 4 teams. * Google recruiters are insanely busy... They are talking to a lot of other extremely talented engineers at the same time. Cut them some slack. **Tips** * Know your patterns well. If you see a question similar to one you did before, make sure to nail it for a strong hire * Definitely revise. Keep an excel sheet of questions you solved and revise the ones you couldn't. * Have a game plan. This means doing mock, recording yourself doing a question, and come up with a workflow for your interviews. * Record yourself doing questions out loud. Lot of times you cannot even understand your own gibberish. * Write comments in your code. It's a green flag to the interviewers (but also not too many comments, remember, we want production code). * Definitely turn off autocomplete in Leetcode * Pace yourself, there's most likely a follow up in a 40 min interview (45 min total but last 5 is for questions). Try to finish main question in around 30 min. If I can do it, you can as well. Good luck! Ask me any questions