I submitted my resume through a former co-worker who now works at Google. Within a week, I was contacted by recruiters. Since I was available locally (Palo Alto, CA) and had a strong internal reference, they found it possible to skip the phone screening and schedule an onsite interview right away.

I had technical interviews with 5 people, plus lunch. The questions were mostly open-ended design problems, with occasional coding of parts of my designs. The interviewers were professional, supportive, and friendly. I felt confident about my answers most of the time. However, with design questions, it is difficult to say how well I did. It is always possible to miss an area that was considered important by the interviewer.

Waiting for results took a long time – about one month, with occasional phone exchanges with the recruiter. Google contacted all the people I listed as references. Once, I had a phone conversation with a potential manager. I expected either additional screening or persuasion to join the team, but somehow the conversation did not feel like either of those.

After a month, when my expectations for getting an offer were considerably high, I received a voice message from the recruiter saying that I was rejected by the executive committee.

Summary: The technical part was good, but the subsequent result processing was annoying and somewhat misleading, making the overall experience "neutral."

Design distributed backend for a query auto-completion feature.