I was contacted by a recruiter.

We decided that Boulder, in the Google Docs group, would be the best fit for my interests and background. The phone interview was fine, although I thought the interviewer was a little bit snarky when I responded to his question on how to improve Docs.

I had an onsite interview with five different sets of people. A couple of the people were very nice, but I found the others to be rather socially inept. It is a tech company, so I expect this to some extent, but their interview process needs to take this into consideration.

Only one person asked a question even remotely related to my work (about decision-making and rationality, I believe), and he had his set of opinions about it, so he didn't seem to like what I said. The coding interviews were all very similar: pretty contrived problems designed to test only one's coding knowledge. I went into the interviews believing that they appreciated creative solutions, but realized that if your solution is not one of the handful that they are familiar with, then they are unable to recognize the solution as viable.

(Perhaps this is also partly my own fault if I didn't clearly express my idea), but a couple of them seemed very doubtful of anything I came up with.

Also, communication problems were an issue. One interviewer asked me to generate a random number. I asked, "From scratch?" and he said yes. I thought about that one for a while and said I was stumped, not knowing the mathematics behind creating a pseudo-random number. When I said that, he was annoyed and went on to explain how to call rand(). At this point, he was not interested in hearing what I had to say as an explanation or in my defense.

The last interviewer shooed me out the door without asking if I needed to use the restroom or if I had any questions.

I note that I am female, and the interviewers were all male. Some of the behavior may have been due to bias, or perhaps those people were simply biased against anyone new. There were very few women at that office though, 7 out of 200 engineers or something like that.

Hopefully, things have improved since then, but at that point, I decided that Google was not a good fit and that I likely would not interview with them again.

Lots of questions about manipulating strings and sets of strings.