First contacted by an email from a Google recruiter asking if I wanted to have a 20 minute conversation. The ensuing phone call was a typical non-technical chat, asking me about my experience and interests, and whether I'd want to work in Mountain View, CA office, to which I said that I would. She gave me an overview of the interview process, letting me know it can take up to 4 months for an applicant to pass through all the stages (1 or 2 technical phone interviews, followed by ~4 hr in-person interview). Asked me what my favorite language is, and said she'd schedule an interview with an engineer, where we will work on a shared online document and I will be asked to write code. She emailed me a 4 page prospectus on the Google hiring process, detailing how to prepare for the interviews. The flyer included the kinds of topics to expect to be quizzed on, and a very useful reading list to help you study up. The first phone interview was scheduled for 1 month after the recruiter first called me. The person was an engineer who politely introduced himself and told me a little bit about what he does. We chatted briefly about my experience, and after exchanging pleasantries, got to business: He gave me a problem to solve and write code on a shared document. I got stuck a few times and he helped me out by suggesting ways to approach the problem. I managed to get through only about 25% of the solution, and then pretty much gave up, at which point he explained the remainder of solution to me. The interview lasted 45 minutes. The engineer was professional, well-mannered and polite. About a week later I was contacted by the recruiter, who notified me that "...we won't be moving forward with the hiring process." I was expecting this, as I knew I had flunked the quiz.

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."