I responded to a billboard in a major metropolitan area. The billboard directed respondents to a website whose domain name was the solution to a computer science/math problem involving prime numbers. After solving the problem and accessing the website, I submitted my credentials and expressed interest in a position.

It took Google about 18 months to respond.

When they did, it moved quickly. I had a first-level phone screen with a recruiter, asking very simple questions about operating systems and scripting. I then had a second-level phone screen with a member of technical staff, who asked me intermediate technical questions and discussed my current job content with me. Based on these phone screens, I was invited to their HQ for an on-site.

On site, it was a reasonably pleasant day. I had 6 or 7 interviews, each with a different engineer. All of them were situational, where the interviewer would open with a scenario and build/evolve it as the interview went on. For example, the easiest one was, "How would you write a program to perform [some simple sysadmin task] in Perl?" Once I solved it, the interviewer would expand the scope or introduce some complication that required more advanced problem-solving skills.

All of the questions were good, meaty, and interesting. The quality of delivery varied widely, however, with some of their engineers being very comfortable conducting interviews and having great people skills, while others were not so much. One gentleman appeared to be inconvenienced by having to interview new hires and had poor personal hygiene, which made enduring his interview uncomfortable. Another aspect that varied widely was attitude; many at the Googleplex were socially stunted, while others were handsome/beautiful, well-dressed, and hip. Almost uniformly, they were arrogant and dismissive.

Ultimately, I received a follow-up call where they offered me a role at a starting salary of $75,000. I politely countered, noting that I was already making more than $100,000 in an area with a much lower cost of living than the SF Bay Area. In the final analysis, Google felt that their brand equity and being able to put their name on my resume was worth more than the $25,000 gap, a point with which I strongly disagreed. I rejected their offer, and we both went our separate ways.

Consider a scenario in which a trans-continental file transfer fails with the following error message: [...]. This is the only information you have to go on. Walk us through your mental line of troubleshooting.