Google Early Career R1 and Bay Area Onsite: Filesystem, Flower Grid, and Expression Tree

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad / Early Career
Result: Passed the interview loop
Report time: May 2026
Onsite location: Bay Area

Timeline and format

The candidate completed R1 around late March and the onsite around May 7. The onsite consisted of two consecutive 45-minute coding interviews in one meeting room, with a new interviewer for the second session. Google provided the computers, and there was no runtime environment, so the candidate had to dry-run code line by line with the interviewer.

R1 coding: filesystem size

Each filesystem object has a class, size, and contained-object list. A file owns a size; a directory contains other objects. Return the total size of the object and every descendant.

The follow-up asked how to make repeated size calculations faster.

Practice: Filesystem Entity Total Size

R1 behavioral

Many questions focused on resolving conflict.

Onsite coding 1: flower-house grid

A grid contains houses H, existing flowers F, and empty cells O where flowers may be planted.

A valid result must satisfy:

1. Every row and column contains at most one flower.
2. Every house has exactly one orthogonally adjacent flower assigned exclusively to it.

Return whether planting flowers on O cells can satisfy the rules. The follow-up asked for every valid planted grid.

The candidate used DFS with rollback and maintained house state. The source never resolved whether exclusivity means a flower may touch only one house or whether a touching flower may simply be assigned to one house.

Practice: Matrix Flower-House Planting Plans

Onsite coding 2: expression-tree leaf flips

The expression tree is a valid binary tree. Internal nodes are AND, OR, or XOR; leaves are Boolean values.

Visit leaves from left to right. For each leaf, flip only that value, compute the root result, restore the leaf, and continue. Return the root result after every independent flip.

The candidate completed an initial solution and then optimized it with the interviewer. Another candidate reported that recomputing the affected path was not considered the expected optimum.

Practice: Boolean Expression Results After Leaf Flips

The candidate received the positive result roughly two and a half weeks after the onsite. Google allowed a choice among New York, the Bay Area, and Seattle for the in-person interview.