I was one of 25 people who qualified to Onsite round of Google Code Jam in New York. I decided to interview with them on the day before the actual competition. There was no phone interview, since getting into Onsite round of GCJ is considerably harder than passing phone interview. There were 4 interview in total - each being 45 minutes long. There was a lunch break after the first two. The third interviewer was about 25 minutes late, so they decided to put him after the fourth one. All that extra time I could explore the floor, they even agreed to arrange me a short show-around. Interview questions seemed rather easy to me - some of the questions seem to have roots in classical programming olympiads problems. They told me in a week, that I did well on the interview, then they sent all my feedback to a recruiter in London, because I wanted to work in Zurich, and not in America. There were several more things they wanted to know before they could make the final decision: grades in university, current salary and so on. Thus, in about one month after the interview they came up with the offer. It's also worth noting that I am still on my last year in university, so I will only start working in about a year.

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."