I was initially contacted by a recruiter via email. After replying, we set up a phone call. The recruiter was pushing me towards a Software Engineer in Test role, even though that's not what I currently do. In hindsight, I think that was probably a major reason why I didn't get an offer.

Throughout the recruitment experience, I kept getting handed off from one recruiter to the next. I think, in total, there were five different people I had to deal with before the interview. It all seemed very disorganized.

One of the recruiters set up a phone screen with an engineer, which I passed without issues. There weren't really any challenging questions.

For the onsite interview, they tried to make me travel to Mountain View, but I wasn't interested in that, so they eventually set up an interview in Seattle for me. The interview was a whole day, I think it was five or six technical interviews, each lasting 45 minutes, and a lunch break with an employee who they claimed did not submit any feedback. When I first arrived there in the morning, the receptionist had a list of people interviewing that day, but I wasn't on that list – further disorganization. She eventually worked out who was supposed to meet me.

After the interview, I didn't receive any communication from Google for two weeks, so I decided to email one of the many recruiters and ask if there was any update. They told me the engineers were busy with peer reviews at the moment, so not all feedback was in yet. Another two and a half weeks went by, and I finally got an email that the recruiter wanted to set up a phone call. He called me the next day to inform me that I hadn't passed the interview, which I was quite surprised by.

I had to sign an NDA, so I won't break that here.

Overall, there wasn't anything too challenging; I've encountered more difficult questions in interviews.

The more difficult ones were open-ended questions about how to test a Google service.