Thirty days is enough to prepare for Google's coding loop — but only if you spend those 30 days on the right things. The candidates who pass Google's bar in a month follow a specific curriculum: pattern-based DSA prep, daily mock practice, and rubric-aware answer phrasing. This is that plan.
Week 1: Foundations (Days 1-7)
Days 1-3: Arrays and hash maps
Two-pointer, sliding window, prefix sum, hash map for O(1) lookup. Target: 15 problems. Pattern recognition is the goal — see Easy/Medium variations of LeetCode 1, 11, 121, 53, 76, 49, 560.
Days 4-5: Strings
Sliding window on strings, anagram patterns, palindrome center expansion. 10 problems. LeetCode 3, 5, 76, 438, 567.
Days 6-7: Linked lists + stack/queue
Reverse, cycle detection, merge two/k sorted lists, monotonic stack. 10 problems. LeetCode 19, 21, 23, 141, 142, 206, 739, 84.
Week 2: Trees and Graphs (Days 8-14)
Days 8-10: Trees
DFS, BFS, level-order, lowest common ancestor, validate BST, serialize/deserialize. 15 problems. LeetCode 94, 98, 102, 104, 105, 110, 124, 199, 226, 297, 543, 572.
Days 11-14: Graphs + topological sort
BFS/DFS, Union-Find, Dijkstra, topological sort (Course Schedule pattern). 15 problems. LeetCode 200, 207, 210, 261, 305, 547, 684, 695, 743, 802.
Week 3: Dynamic Programming (Days 15-21)
Days 15-17: 1D DP
Climbing stairs, house robber, coin change, longest increasing subsequence. 12 problems. LeetCode 70, 198, 213, 300, 322, 416, 518.
Days 18-21: 2D DP + advanced
Edit distance, LCS, knapsack, palindromic substrings, decode ways. 12 problems. LeetCode 5, 10, 64, 72, 91, 139, 152, 309, 416, 494, 647, 1143.
Week 4: Mocks and System Design (Days 22-30)
Days 22-25: Daily mocks
Two 45-minute mock interviews per day. Use InterviewLift's AI Mock Interview with Google-mode for rubric-calibrated scoring. Focus on verbal communication, not just code correctness.
Days 26-28: System design (L5+ only)
Three system-design topics: design Google Drive, design a URL shortener (bit.ly), design a search ranking system. Use Google-scale anchors: 8.5B queries/day, PB-scale, 100K QPS peak. Read our System Design Cheat Sheet for FAANG.
Days 29-30: Behavioural + Googleyness
Prepare 8 behavioural stories mapped to the Google rubric (GCA, RRK, leadership, Googleyness). Practice 'Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager' and 'Tell me about an ambiguous problem you solved'. InterviewLift's AI Mock Interview includes Google-mode behavioural rounds with Googleyness scoring.
What to Skip
- Solving 500+ LeetCode problems. Quality (pattern coverage + verbal practice) beats quantity.
- Memorising language-specific tricks (Python list comprehensions for everything). Write the code you'd ship.
- Bit manipulation and obscure CS theory unless your role specifically demands it.
- Speed-coding under 10 minutes per problem. Real Google interviews give 40-45 minutes and value structured thinking.
- Reading 'How I prepped for FAANG in 6 months' Medium articles — they are usually survivorship bias.
InterviewLift's mock interview simulator pulls from the same 4,800 verified Google questions in our bank, so your mock loop matches the real loop.
Revisado pela equipe de sucesso do cliente da InterviewLift, que prepara candidatos para entrevistas reais toda semana.
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