google swe intern interview

[u/Euphoric-Run5228]

so i got an interview for google’s swe internship as an incoming second year, and have it in 2 weeks. this will be my first tech interview, and i’ve basically never done leetcode and will take DSA this upcoming school year. ik it’s looking rough, but how do i go about prepping? im willing to work insanely hard for these next two weeks, but im starting at zero and have no idea what to prep. any advice would be appreciated!

[u/Responsible_Alps_567]

I don't personally think that's really enough time to learn how to implement all the data structures from scratch without cheating (like you would over the course of a semester) and practice leetcode so if I were you, I would start by asking chatgpt to explain stuff like this: "tell me about X data structure/algorithm, how it's implemented, what it's useful for, the associated time and space complexities for all operations, and how it's used to solve Leetcode problems". Really what you need to know for most interviews (there's always a chance you actually get asked to implement one on the spot though) is that a hash table will give you fast lookups and insertions, a heap can quickly tell you the largest or smallest in the collection and maintain the property in log time, a linked list has fast insertion/deletion at the very beginning/end of it and maintains order of insertion, etc.

That will give you the main info you need to use these data structures as tools when doing Leetcode. I would probably start a section on the Neetcode roadmap and prompt enough info to get you started and get practicing. Also note that there seem to be some topics that Google is asking a lot for internship interviews, from what I've seen it's Trees, Graphs, DFS, BFS, recursion, backtracking. Recursion on its own can take a while to wrap your head around and it's very useful for a few of those topics. You don't have enough time to study everything so go through the standard array, hash table, two pointer, sliding window problems that are very common to get asked anywhere and then focus on what Google seems to be asking a lot of.

The fact that you're even getting this interview as a rising sophomore is insane dude, you must be in good shape. Don't sweat it if you don't get an offer from Google, there's a lot of great companies out there. Make sure you're in good shape for next recruiting cycle and you'll be in a really good place. Best of luck!!

[u/hdtv2001 → u/Responsible_Alps_567]

I mean cheating isn’t in the question, one should always be honest. All the advice to learn DSA is pretty good here, thanks.

[u/Responsible_Alps_567 → u/hdtv2001]

Yeah sorry, I worded that weird. Basically what I meant was that if I was going to learn a data structure right now, I would go look at examples online. That's not "cheating" at all, but the best way to learn is probably doing it the way that you would for classes, where the professor tells you some information about the data structure and gives you homework to do, insisting that you don't look at any code online and figure stuff out. That unfortunately isn't really an option when you have 2 weeks to prep for an interview

[u/hdtv2001 → u/Responsible_Alps_567]

Oh ok I get it now

[u/Euphoric-Run5228 → u/Responsible_Alps_567]

thank you, this is soso helpful!! yep 2 weeks to learn all of dsa prob isn’t feasible but might as well see what i can do 🤞