Google Early Career Canada Rejection: Logger Rate Limit, Bingo Generation, and Islands

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad / Early Career — Canada
Result: Rejected after the interview loop
Report time: October 2024

Timeline

• August 15: OA
• August 30: recruiter outreach
• September 12: interviews
• September 20: transcript requested for next step
• October 1: rejection call

Coding 1

A Number of Islands variation that the candidate solved cleanly. The variation was not preserved, so no exact link is asserted.

Coding 2: search logger rate limit

Search calls arrive with increasing timestamps and query strings. Send a query to the server only when the same content has not been successfully sent within the previous 60 seconds. Rejected duplicate calls do not reset the accepted timestamp.

Practice: Out-of-Order Logger Rate Limiter

Coding 3: generate Bingo boards

For each Bingo column, sample five distinct values from its 15-number range. The interviewer required one random call per cell and every valid board to remain reachable. The candidate used swap-with-last sampling rather than repeated retries or costly list deletion.

The follow-up asked for five pairwise-distinct boards; one differing element is sufficient to distinguish two boards.

Practice: Generate Pairwise-Distinct Bingo Boards

Behavioral round

The behavioral interviewer was supportive. Recruiting later said one technical interviewer had supplied too many hints, producing an insufficient signal.