I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Jan 2014
Interview
I was contacted through linkedin by a recruiter and after giving them a few references from friends who work at google, i was able to bypass phone screen. My friends said they received a form that they filled out. But even than, I was passed around to at least 4 different recruiters by the time I was actually onsite. I was interviewed by 6 people, plus the lunch person that had no say on the process. 3 of the interviewers asked me to code on a white board, and 3 did not. I thought that was odd, I had expected all of them to ask me to code. I made a mistake of making google my first interview in 7 years so I made silly errors. Overall it wasn't as dreadful as others described it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected, the recruiters sent materials to review. Definitely go through sample problems from CTCI book and Elements of Programming Interviews. C++ and Java works best for these questions. Actually, C++ works the best since Java can be very verbose at times.
Initial intro call, prep time , prep material provisions,
1 Phone Screening by HR, 3 DSA, 1 HLD and 1 Googliness, Team matching and offer negotiation and offer discussion , offer acceptance
After clearing all the interviews in 2 months, here comes the team match. Where no one ever knows when they gonna get a team match call. Even if you get the TM call next comes the HC again no one knows why they reject.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding questions from Leetcode google tagged but deep dived into it based on the level.
The interview lasted about a day, with 5 different interviewers. For each section, the technical questions took most of the part. They also showed me their office in Toronto, which was nice
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What was the most difficult problem you solved during your last job?
