I applied online and received an email within a few days from a Google recruiter. A technical screening interview was organized for the following week. A Google engineer called me and started by introducing himself and Google, then quickly moved to a programming question. I managed to solve the problem using recursion within about 40 minutes with only a few hints.

After one week, I received an email for onsite interviews, which were organized for the second week after.

The first onsite interview went well. I recognized the interviewer from my previous university. The programming task involved class declarations and pointers. I believe I did okay with this question but ran out of time to provide a solid solution.

In my second interview, the interviewer gave me a few hints since I was not making progress, and I eventually solved it. Then, we had lunch with another engineer.

My third interview was the worst. He asked me the same question as the first interviewer, and I mentioned I had already been asked that question. He then asked a different question that I did not fully understand in terms of the desired direction, and it ended up being an SQL command question. I made a mistake in the third question he asked: I started coding before I had fully considered the entire question.

The fourth interview was a presentation of my work. This went smoothly, and the interview was very cordial.

The fifth interview went well, although I ran out of time. There were two seemingly simple coding questions. Even though it was past time, this interviewer kept talking about the groups within Google, so I thought I did well with him.

Overall, I managed to solve all the questions, but with hints. I believe I did well with three interviews, okay with one, and poorly with one.

How would you design a system to do such and such?

I thought the interviewer wanted me to talk about functions and data storage, but in the end, he seemed to want specific SQL statements, which I was not too familiar with.