I spoke with two HR people, the first was local but didn't have any positions that fit me. She forwarded me on to an HR staffer at the Mountain View office which led into a phone interview with an engineer who was working on Chrome and O3D. It was pretty exciting to get to talk to engineers who are working on all these cool projects. I guess I passed the phone interview because the next step was them flying me to Mountain View for an on-site interview. I didn't really blow them out of the water because I was rusty on a lot of stuff, so I heard back a week later with a report on where my weaknesses were, which was very helpful. The HR staff were both very helpful, and the engineers that I interviewed with were more or less nice folk, some more friendly than others. None were hostile or intimidating. I really enjoyed getting to work through problems with real Google engineers.