Have You Received a Google Phone Interview

Here is an experience from a recent Google Phone Screen.
Once a recruiter reached out and the interview date is set, you will receive an email with instructions on the interview:

General Technical resources

You will be introduced to
1. Google's products.
2. A Tech Dev Guide for CS fundamentals

A clear scale of the technical questions is listed here
A complete Tech Dev Guide

3. The go-to books for interviewees:

Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann
Clean Code by Robert C. Martin


Overview of The Phone Screening Interview

1. This will be a virtual technical screen for 45 minutes. Candidates should make time for follow-up technical questions and behavioral discussion.
2. The candidate's thought process in approaching a problem is essential
3. Be sure to communicate any assumptions that are unclear on the questions
4. Make sure your code works on a complier, even though it's edited on a Google Doc
5. You will hear from the recruiter about ONE WEEK after the screening

Tools for The Screening

Google Docs (with no access to a compiler or code editor) and Google Meet

Tips for Excelling in Your Interview

Be responsive to the hints provided by your screener
Write real and working code instead of pseudo code
You can start with the brute-force solution and improve on it. Just make sure the screener is aware that you are taking an intermediate step.


The Tech Question

A disk drive is comprised of N sectors. Each sector can be one of three types: Data, Garbage, Free, we use ‘D’ to represent Data, ‘F’ to represent Free, ‘G’ to represent Garbage.
One disk drive looks like: F D G F D G

// F D G F D G
public class Disk {
    // return the type of given sector
    char get(int index);
    // get(1) -> 'D'

    // swap the data of given two sectors
    void swap(int index1, int index2);
    // swap(0, 1) -> D F G F D G
   
    // return the size of this disk
    int size();
    // size() -> 6

   // rearrange all sectors of this disk
   void rearrange();
}

Implement the rearrange method, the goal is to rearrange all sectors and move all Data sectors to the front.
One valid output for the above disk is: D D F G F G
Only the above three methods are allowed to be used to achieve this goal.




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