My Invitation to Google Foobar!

Google Foobar… there’s only one of two ways you’ve found this article. The first reason being you’ve browsed the internet for too long today, and you’ve reached the pits and hit the computer science section 🤓. The second reason would be that you’ve got an invitation to the google foobar challenger, like myself!

So what is this Google Foobar challenge?!

> There isn’t that much information out there about the challenge itself, but in essence, it’s a coding challenge that google will offer you, provided you’re logged in using your google account and searching for specific programming related searches that more than likely align with what a normal Google software developer will be searching on a daily basis.

What happens in the Google Foobar challenge?

> So at present, I haven’t fully completed my challenge, but from what I’ve gather on the internet, and from my own experience, there are 5 stages. The first stage has one question, this is an easy question (easy section of leetcode style question). The second stage is more difficult, and there are two problems within this section. To my knowledge, stage 3 also will have two problems, they will require performance to be taken into account, and stage 4 and stage 5 will only have one problem. You’re given 24 hours for the first problem, 3 days for each of the problems in stage 2, I believe you get 7 days each for the stage 3 problems, I think you get two weeks for stage 4 and one month for stage 5.

What’s so special about this coding test?

> So the big selling point of this coding test is that once you get to a specific stage (stage 3) you will get the opportunity to leave your contact details over to a Google recruiter. Judging by what level you get to would determine what skill level of a job you would warrant. For instance, if you give good answers to the stage 5 questions, you could come in as a senior developer!

Don’t focus so much on the fact that you could get contacted by Google, take it as an activity to learn and solve problems.

This is the most important takeaway, don’t put pressure on yourself because of how much you want to get into FAANG companies. Enjoy the challenges and try and learn from them, if you don’t know the solution straight away, that’s a great thing, you’ll have more strings to add to your bow by the end of it!