Google Early Career R1 Rejection: Graph Reachability With a Broken Node and BQ

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad / Early Career
Result: Rejected after R1
Report time: June 2025

R1 contained one coding interview and one behavioral interview. The candidate confirmed that this was the first two-interview stage before a later two-interview onsite.

Coding: avoid a broken graph node

Given a graph, a start node, a destination, and one broken node, determine whether the destination remains reachable without using the broken node. The graph may contain cycles.

The follow-up asks for the minimum distance from the start to every reachable node while still excluding the broken node.

Practice: Distances While Avoiding a Broken Node

Behavioral interview

The interviewer asked many hypothetical and experience questions:

• Another team is building the same thing. How do you coordinate, and what if neither team wants to compromise?
• How do you work with a difficult coworker?
• How would you plan a new product feature?
• You assign teammates work you believe they will like, but they dislike it. What do you do?
• What was your most challenging work?
• Describe a work failure.
• How would you keep learning and contributing at Google?

The candidate did not advance to the later onsite stage.