I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Apr 2014
Interview
Phone interview, on-site interview. Both involved specific programming problems and they asked me to write some unit tests. For the on-site interview, I had 5 sessions of 45-minute programming problems with a lunch meeting with an employee in between. Overall very impersonal, I felt like they were only interested in how I coded, not as much about why I was interested in the role or what my previous experience was. I was also disappointment that I went to lunch with an older hardware engineer when I was applying as a younger software engineer. It was hard to get a sense of who my co-workers would be or what my day-to-day life would be like.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in Apr 2015
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me to initiate the process. We went over some basics via email and afterwards we had a phone conversation. That led to a 45 minute phone interview with a current SET at google. There was no personality or behavioral aspects to the interview, it was all programming on a shared google document.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked to code a question and design test cases for it. They asked me not to share the question.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Apr 2015
Interview
I was contacted through e-mail by a Google recruiter who found me in their system since I've interviewed with them three years ago. The recruiter scheduled for a 15 minutes screening phone call to talk about job description but was late by half an hour. While on the call, there were a lot of background noise so I couldn't understand what the recruiter was asking / saying. It seemed odd to me that a massive company like Google could not have their recruiters handle calls in a quiet environment.
We agreed that we would continue the interview process and scheduled an 1:1 technical interview for 3 weeks later. The recruiter was helpful in providing a lot of useful information regarding how I could prepare for the interview.
During the interview, it was a bit awkward since the interviewer asked me to answer his questions verbally and type out the answers at the same time. The opinion and behaviour questions were limited to 1~2 minutes each. He also was very insistent on asking kernel related questions, even though it wasn't part of the job description and I told him I had no experience in it.
At the end, the interviewer gave a coding question that I was to complete in 15 minutes. It was hard to understand the interviewer due to his accent, and the question was very vague. However, after spending 10 minutes asking clarifications, the question turned out to be relatively reasonable but I didn't have enough time to finish it.
My recommendation would be for the candidate to be very familiar with data structures and algorithms.