I was first contacted by a recruiter. She conducted a basic (to my mind) skills test as a sort of front-end filter to ensure my qualifications aligned with what was being sought. This was done over the phone.

After this, an actual phone interview was scheduled with an engineer.

The phone interview became very technical, very quickly. The interviewer presented many scenarios relevant to Google's situation as a provider of massively distributed services. He was not looking for me to guess how they did it or give a specific "correct" answer, but rather to see how I arrived at workable solutions. I liked this approach.

I was then flown out to the Googleplex for a one-day, all-day interview with about six different people. Each interview lasted roughly an hour, with a lunch break in the middle. The interviews covered algorithms, software engineering, project management, team management, and more. All of them were, in their own way, quite technical, and all focused heavily on questions that posed a problem and asked you to solve it. Again, they were looking for how you solved problems as much as for the solutions themselves.

I had read about many similar interview processes beforehand, so I knew pretty much what to expect. I was glad I had done so, however. Some past interviewees had not expected this sort of academic-oral-exam style of interview and disliked it considerably. I was fine with it, despite the outcome, because I knew it was coming and because I actually liked the approach.

In the end, I was not hired. I was not told exactly why, only that the group of people who had interviewed me had chosen not to proceed. My speculation is that either I did not have enough actual management experience for what they were looking for, or that one or more of the interviewers simply didn't think I was up to the job. I bear no grudges, as I knew the role was a bit of a stretch for me. It would have been cool to get, but as it is, I got a glimpse into one of the cooler companies making things happen on the web.

You're the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

Implement a program that works like "tail".