I applied through LinkedIn in early October, and the total process took about 4 months. The recruiter contacted me 4-5 weeks after my initial application.

We set up a phone interview, but the earliest available date was mid-December. The phone interview was brief and pretty simple, focusing on basic data structures and algorithms. I was asked for an onsite interview just a couple of hours after completing this.

The onsite interview, however, had to wait until January due to the holiday schedule. I arrived at the Google office on the morning of the interview and was met (about 10 minutes late) by my first interviewer, an engineer who didn't seem to know his way around the office.

After 45 minutes, the interview ended abruptly, and a new person walked in. This was the basic pattern for the whole day. It was a 6-hour process, including lunch in the commissary. For the most part, each interview was pretty casual, and the difficulty level was not nearly what I expected. Nearly all the questions were about object-oriented design and basic algorithms, with no graph theory, which I had been anticipating.

I felt pretty good about my performance overall, although I probably spent more time on certain problems than I should have. It was difficult to get a sense of proper pacing since each interviewer had a vastly different demeanor, and the range of problems varied from simple recall to complex problem-solving.

About 2 weeks after my interview, I received a call from the recruiter who simply said that I had not been selected at this time. She was polite and apologetic but could offer no actionable feedback.

Overall, my interactions with Google employees were friendly and relatively prompt. I felt the process took far too long, but I suppose this is to be expected for such a large company. I also feel that the peer review system of interviewing left me almost completely in the dark about how well I performed.

It is also somewhat odd that at no point in the process was I made aware of which team I was being considered for.

There weren't any questions that were surprisingly difficult.