Google New Grad R1 Rejection: Two Travelers Sharing a Bus Route and BQ

Role: Software Engineer, New Grad
Result: Rejected after R1
Report time: December 2025

Coding: shared route to a destination

Two travelers, A and B, both need to reach the same destination in a graph. They may meet at an intermediate location and then ride a bus together. Find the minimum time or number of steps.

The candidate could choose how to represent the graph on the whiteboard.

A commenter who had previously seen the problem remembered a follow-up with three travelers. However, the source does not define whether cost means elapsed time with parallel travel, total edge usage with a shared suffix counted once, or another metric. It also omits edge direction and weights. Those missing rules materially change the problem, so no exact practice link is asserted.

Behavioral interview

The behavioral round was an exhausting sequence from a question bank, with many conflict scenarios:

• Conflict with a coworker
• Conflict with a manager
• A teammate who has poor relationships with the entire team

The candidate said the last scenario felt especially unnatural, asked for clarification, and eventually disengaged from the interview. They received the rejection by email a little more than a week later.