How much time did you spend preparing for Google's interviews? | Coding interview preparation
How much time did you spend preparing for Google's interviews? I spent six weeks preparing. Google was the only place I wanted to work. I had never used any real computer science constructs in my 30 years of work experience.
I got a whiteboard and markers and spent every day working on problems from Cracking the Code Interview. I solved the problems using C++ templates, to force myself to focus on the algorithms and notice what assumptions I was making about the underlying data types.
I had two weeks to prepare for the phone interview. After that I asked for a month to prepare for the on-site interviews.
Understand time/space complexity analysis. Know the time complexity of the basic data structures, especially hash tables. Learn to manage the space on the whiteboard. Think about where the computer will be repeating the same work twice, since that is probably where you can optimize.
The interviews are really not very hard. Don't panic.
