Interview date: April 2014.

I first applied through their online jobs portal. That job listing was also on LinkedIn, where I first found it.

Three days after submitting my application, I received an email from a recruiter asking me a few questions about which location I wanted to work at, as the job posting had several available.

I was then transferred to another recruiter who asked me more specific questions, including:

• Other job offer timelines
• Days available to interview
• Whether I knew anyone at Google

I provided her with a list of my available days, and an official phone interview was scheduled for two weeks later.

I was given reading materials, including blogs on the interviewing process and book recommendations.

The phone interview was 45 minutes long, and we jumped straight into the questions. There were two programming questions that I had to answer and code in a Google Doc.

After coding was done, my interviewer asked if I had any questions for him. He was very nice and, despite a thick accent, managed to convey the problems clearly.

The questions were not difficult. I can't stress enough the importance of basic data structures and algorithms on those structures.

Examples include:

• Arrays
• Linked Lists
• Trees (BST)
• Graphs

Something unexpected was how little my interviewer cared about syntax, even though I had to specify which language I would be using to my recruiter. I was asked two questions and only wrote code for the first, and the general algorithm in pseudocode for the second.