I'm actually involved with hiring, and have gone on many outreach campus trips around Australia and NZ (we get 100s of students in a room, and talk about Google and try to get applications). Fun story: I got made into a meme on Reddit once (from a photo from these trips).
For Software Engineering roles, my opinion is that Google hires generalists. This means that while you might be an expert in Java, maybe a team will have an opening for a C++ dev. We don't expect you to know C++ if your resume says you're a Java developer, but we try to assess that you'd be capable of slotting into almost any role.
What this means is, don't focus too much on the minutia of one language or type of problem. As for how we assess this, my advice for interviews: know one or two programming languages reasonably well, and be able to talk through solving problems on the phone. Call even your non-technical friends and get them to ask you the "basic" questions from online coding questions, and write up an answer in Google Docs while you do it.
Here are some links:
careers.google.com/how-we-hire/
techdevguide.withgoogle.com/
I'm actually involved with hiring, and have gone on many outreach campus trips around Australia and NZ (we get 100s of students in a room, and talk about Google and try to get applications). Fun story: I got made into a meme on Reddit once (from a photo from these trips).
For Software Engineering roles, my opinion is that Google hires generalists. This means that while you might be an expert in Java, maybe a team will have an opening for a C++ dev. We don't expect you to know C++ if your resume says you're a Java developer, but we try to assess that you'd be capable of slotting into almost any role.
What this means is, don't focus too much on the minutia of one language or type of problem. As for how we assess this, my advice for interviews: know one or two programming languages reasonably well, and be able to talk through solving problems on the phone. Call even your non-technical friends and get them to ask you the "basic" questions from online coding questions, and write up an answer in Google Docs while you do it.
HTH
Now, that's something I don't usually see on the quora, or reddit posts!
Thank you, Sam!