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Google Telephonic Intern Interview

I was actually looking for such a platform where i can share my Google Telephonic interview experience with CS guys.
I was interviewed in dec 2010, it was very exciting time for cs people at IIT. Everyone was preparing for interviews and big companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Google, facebook, etc, were scheduled to come to the campus that year for internships. I could not clear the Microsoft written test (I was not well prepared i guess). But then one day i received a call from Google, that i'll be interviewed on phone for intenship. I was very excited and nervous. Well, this was first interview of my life and i didn't know anything about how telephonic interviews worked. I asked my seniors about it, but they could not give me a very clear picture of how should i go about it.


I could not find any online platform where i can actually read about this or schedule mock telephonic interview for practice. There were few websites for that but for such a service i had to pay in dollars (seriously!!). So, all i did  was started practicing interview questions. I wasted lots of time googling and shifting from one site to another and then browsing through 100's of comments by the people on questions trying to figure out which was correct. 

So, finally when i was interviewed, he started of by asking me about the projects i did (don't write anything on your resume that you have not done). I told him about my projects, he was not very interested in it( all they are actually verifying is that you know about stuff you have written on your resume). Then we moved on to our first algorithm question. He shared a Google Doc with me, where i had to write code. The question was about printing superset out of the set of numbers given. Well!! i was not sure about this question, this was the first time i was seeing this question. But i tried not to get nervous and started thinking about it. I started off with a recursive approach, but then i don't know why but i started thinking for
iterative solution (which was a mistake, don't leave your first approach without giving satisfactory justification). I didn't
realize back then but i messed up.

So, finally he asked me to code recursive approach, which i did. But since i wasted little time, i got little nervous and
commited small mistakes in my code, which he then asked me to correct. But finally we were done with this question.
Then he asked me another simple question, which i don't remember exactly, but i did it well.

And i was happy that everything went well, but unfortunately i was not selected for next round. At that time i didn't realize
all these things, but Google is very strict about its interview process. They have set of 3 or more questions for each round and you only have a chance of getting selected if you can answer all three within time provided. They will keep pushing you towards the right approach till you reach, and if in case you are out of time and have not touched all the 3 questions, well you should be extremely lucky to make it to next round.

These are the few things i thought i should share with cs people appearing for Google interviews. I will share more of my experience in the coming blogs.............