I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google
Interview
Contacted by a recruiter via linked who scheduled a technical phone interview screening within a week. The recruiter alos provided interview prep materials and links to helpful resources.
The interview was a typical google interview - asked to answer a question on google docs. There was some background noise during the interview, I could here people playing ping pong or something.
Advice: Schedule your interview earlier in the day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected. Make use of "cracking the coding interview" book.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Jan 2014
Interview
One round phone interview. The HR helped me to set up the phone interview. It took around 45 min. The questions were not touch. At first, serveral questions about the java. And one coding question. Keep communication during the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Not difficult. It is like why can not compare two strings. And how to compare one object which initialed as a string with string. The coding quesition is to find the kth in two sorted arrays.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Google in Mar 2014
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter that met me on a career fair for my university. They were interested in receiving an application from me and so I decided to apply. About a month after I sent in my resume they contacted me and said they would like to setup a phone interview. The phone interview was pretty great - the lady that was interviewing me was extremely friendly and calmed my nerves. I do terribly on phone interviews because phone conversations make me nervous (no idea why). I did pretty badly and only got to the second interview question out of 3 ( I later found out from talking to her on the onsite interview day that she had 3 questions to ask me and the first 2 were just warmups). However, she liked my personality and said I walked her through my thought process very well. A few weeks later I was told that I had been invited for a series of on site interview (5). The first interview went badly as I was very nervous, but the last 4 went very well. About 2 weeks later I was contacted one final time and notified they would not be extending me an offer. I had no time to prepare/study anything for either the phone or the onsite interviews due to a heavy course load (70 hours or so of homework a week), so I feel I did well considering. If I had time to prepare/study I feel confident I would have gotten the position. Overall the experience was very positive - they communicated very clearly at all times and everyone involved in the entire process was extremely professional and friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All questions were fairly equal in difficulty - I managed to just finish solving them right as the interview with each person ended.