Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with your manager.

"I got into the loop through a backdoor-ish hiring manager route instead of a cold apply, and for L4+ I had to have a soft match with a team before the loop even started. My process was a recruiter alignment call, the GHA questionnaire, one phone screen, two onsite technicals, and a standard Googliness behavioral. What stood out was how collaborative and non-LeetCodey it felt, especially the phone screen, which was basically a live algorithms conversation that pushed on first principles instead of rehearsed patterns. I also learned that Google is doing more team matching before hiring committee now, because a hiring manager's statement of support can strengthen your packet if one round is only lean hire. I ended up accepting because the interview experience was consistently positive and honestly much better than how Google interviews are usually portrayed online."

"I applied for a new grad software engineer role, did the OA, and then got nudged forward by a recruiter after I let my original link expire. Because I was slow to schedule, the interview slots were really backed up, so my live rounds did not happen until January. The process itself was pretty short once it started: one easy live coding round, then a final that was a coding interview plus a behavioral across two consecutive days. Everything was virtual and honestly a lot less intimidating than the in-person finance interviews I had done before. I got the offer in February, but I already had another offer lined up, so I stopped at team matching and never actually met a hiring manager."

"This was my second time going through the same Meta MLE process, and compared to the prior year the big changes were a written portal pre-screen and the new AI-enabled coding round. A sourcer reached out by email, I filled out the questionnaire, then I did a 45-minute coding screen with two LeetCode-style questions before getting the full loop. I split the loop across four days, one round per day: coding, AI-enabled debugging/coding, behavioral, and an ML design round on a TikTok-style recommendation system. The coding felt very standard Meta to me, but the AI round was the distinctive one because I had to debug an unfamiliar codebase, run tests intelligently, and use an LLM without blindly trusting it."