The recruiter was very compassionate and professional throughout the entire process, all the way until conveying the rejection decision. I received specific feedback on minor issues and mistakes made, along with some compliments.

Overall, the experience felt like a large machinery (it's Google, after all!) churning through a huge number of candidates. They seem to believe they can hire only star software engineers who code like machines, as if coding is the sole aspect of software engineering and allows for no mistakes on the first attempt.

The interviewers presented a mix of friendly and intimidating, even jerkish, personalities. One interviewer used intimidating words like 'Be careful' whenever he thought there was a mistake in an interface I was asked to define. Another said, 'We have already done this,' and shook my hand in a rude way (I had accidentally made the gesture once already).

In a couple of cases, the English language proficiency of the engineers was poor enough that I could not understand their questions, or I was unsure if they understood my analysis when they gave feedback. Overall, the process felt like the engineers wanted to prove why they were in Google and why most others interviewing should not be.

In one instance, another employee was annoyed that my interviewer was taking too long in the conference room, banging on the door. When we exited the interview, this other person started yelling about having to wait so long and being unable to get into their meeting.

At the end of the interview, I left with the feeling that this place has more baggage of bad personalities and a churn of imperfect human beings, rather than a place where complex distributed systems problems are solved to impact the average person in the world.

Cache API Design

Performance investigation to assess a timing-out website.

Implementing an Iterator (next, hasNext) interface for a stream of news topics.

Search for a max value in an unsorted array. (Very abstract question) in better than O(n).