I had always wanted to work at Google, but I never thought I would get in. I'm 45 years old and I have a 2.2 GPA. My friend at Google submitted my resume and I waited quite a while before I got a rejection letter. In retrospect, with them receiving 3000 resumes a day, it must be very easy to get lost in the shuffle unless your resume really stands out, and mine certainly did not. I waited a while and then contacted Google again and asked them to reconsider my resume, and they did. From that point on, it was an amazing process. Right away I got an email asking when would be a good time for a recruiter to talk with me (HR screen). I said, "If not now, when?" and 60 seconds later I got a call from the recruiter. We talked for 45 minutes and mostly it seemed like just fun chitchat. She asked about my experience and what I liked to work on and what languages I preferred. Then she said she would find an engineer suitable for me and would call me back soon. She called the next day and we scheduled a phone interview (tech screen) for the following week. She also send me an email about what to expect and things to brush up on. The next week I got the call from an engineer. We worked together in a Google Doc, and on the phone. He asked me about my resume, particularly my machine language experience. Then we did a bit manipulation problem, and I missed an obvious optimization. Then he asked me the main problem which was very clever. I came upon the solution very quickly, using recursion, but I screwed up on the complexity analysis. Afterwards, we chatted about Google life. It was a fun experience, but I figured I had blown it. I got a call from the recruiter an hour later telling me that the feedback was positive and that we would move on to the on-site interview. I spent a month in front of my white board practicing problems, especially from Gayle Laakmann's book, Cracking the Coding Interview. I read through Introduction to Algorithms , but there was just too much information in there to cram into my brain. At one point I was worried about my low 2.2 GPA and asked if I would be given a chance to explain the situation. I sent them an email and 30 seconds later one of the recruiters called me and said, basically, no one cares about your GPA. I get the impression that it's just a metric they use if there's nothing else on your resume to judge you by. I am not going to describe the interviews here. Sorry. Not only did I sign an NDA, but I also don't want to spoil it for anyone. I will just say this much: Those people who said, "They asked me a simple CS101 question and I answered it and they still didn't hire me, those arrogant pricks!", well, dude you completely missed the point of the exercise. It's really not about getting the "right" answer. The interviewers were all very cool. Some were reserved, and some were friendly and outgoing. I had a very fun time, but I missed a lot of simple things, didn't complete all of the problems, made simple syntax errors, and completely fumbled the interview that focused on Java. I left depressed, but feeling like I had been given a very fair chance. I got a call from a recruiter two days later saying that the interview feedback was "pretty positive" and that he decided to forward it to the Hiring Committee. The following Monday the Hiring Committee gave me a "unanimous thumbs up". Another recruiter emailed me to say she would be contacting my references and my application would go through the Compensation Committee and the Executive Committee. I was given a questionnaire to fill out, asking about past employment details and such. It also asked about any past achievements I may want the Executive Committee to know about. They said I would probably hear something in the next few weeks. Getting close to the end of the two week period, at 10:30pm, I got the email to "extend me an offer". When I replied to the email, she saw I was still awake so she called me on my cell phone at 11pm to give me the details as soon as possible. And the details were VERY generous, so I did not negotiate. Overall, it was an awesome experience. Everyone was super nice and polite. The whole thing took two months, but a month of that was me asking for time to prepare. I've heard of cases where they can push it through in two weeks if you re really in a hurry. They kept asking me if I had any time constraint that they needed to work with. Also, yes, I asked, and Larry Page did review and sign off on my final approval. From his own words, he's gotten so good at it that it takes him less than a minute for each one. I will only give this advice about the actual interview process: If you thought you aced it, you probably missed something. It's not about getting the "right" answer. It is about soooo much more. But, like I said, I don't want to spoil the fun.