Google New Grad Phone Screen Rejection: Family-Tree Prompt Without an Objective

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Rejected the same day
Report time: August 2025

Interview experience

The interviewer verbally described a family tree where parent nodes represent parents and child nodes represent children, but did not state what function or result to implement.

The candidate repeatedly asked for the required operation and for an example walkthrough. The interviewer instead asked the candidate to decide what the problem should be. The candidate eventually invented a requirement, created an example, and implemented that self-defined task.

Why no practice link is included

Comments proposed several possible objectives:

• Lowest common ancestor
• Distance between two people
• Traversal order
• Closest cousin
• Modeling a family as a graph rather than a tree

None was confirmed by the original author as the actual interview objective. Even the question of relationships between relatives was undefined. Publishing any one of those guesses would fabricate the prompt.

The candidate received a rejection later that day and said this was the first interview where they had been required to invent the task rather than clarify a stated goal.