RejectedOnsite

L4 Virtual Onsite, 12 Minutes of Coding on a Vague String-Templating Question

GoogleSoftware Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026

First round VO, coding — the interviewer gave me this question: given a KV map and a string where keys are marked as indices, replace the parts of the string wrapped in %% with the corresponding value from the KV map: {USER=>admin, HOME=>/%USER%/home} Input: I am %USER% My home is %HOME% Output: I am admin My home is /admin/home Then he had me come up with edge cases. My first thought was: if we…

Shared by a candidate · reported Aug 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.