I tried to apply for a Director or Senior Director job at Google through employee referrals. I knew several employees, and they all highly recommended me.

Google seems ill-equipped to hire senior management folks at the Director/VP levels. They may have a separate external recruiting firm for this, but I could not figure that out.

The internal recruiters with whom I worked did try to find a match and finally found one position, Engineering Manager, for which I might be a fit. I was much more senior, but I was curious to check Google out and compare it to the other VP of Engineering offer that I had received from a startup. I had also heard good things about Google as a great place to work, etc. – all the usual stuff you read everywhere.

Anyway, about the interview: I first got a call from a Director-level person, and I easily passed his Computer Science-style interview, which talked about algorithm complexity, etc. I was invited for an in-person interview and was looking forward to it.

But the experience with six face-to-face interviewers left a lot to be desired. Frankly, the way I was treated was "professional" but "cold." There was absolutely no attempt made to learn about me, my skills, or what I brought to the table. All the interviews, except one, were straight, standard, out-of-the-book tech Q&A.

My situation was that I was very technical but had focused my career on management and had not written code for several years. Their interview was tailored along newbie manager lines. They asked algorithm and design questions, all of which I answered. One of the guys asked me if I wanted to write code for one of my solutions, and I politely refused, saying that I was not interested in writing code at this stage of my career. Another question I did not get was related to performance; it was a good problem with a creative solution, but somehow my brain did not go towards the right solution. I did pick it up after I got hints, but I suppose that was not good enough.

Anyway, to cut the long story short, I did not get the offer since I am sure they thought I was not technical enough. But from my side, I never would have worked for a company that was so clueless during the interview process. The process treats everyone the same; they don't care about you; they only care if you can get their questions, and I suppose they have strong faith in that process. Good luck to them.

Given US denomination coins, what is the algorithm to make change for any amount?

Complexity of the Binary Search Algorithm.