I was first contacted by a recruiter.

He emailed me out of the blue and said he really liked my GitHub profile.

Honestly, at first, I didn't believe it was real. We emailed back and forth a few times, but I wasn't really looking to move to the Bay Area, so I never actually sent in my CV.

About a month went by, and he emailed me back. He just wanted to follow up, said that he never received the resume, and hoped I would get back in touch. So I told him about my situation, and he mentioned that they had an LA office. This was news to me, and much closer to home. So I sent in my resume, and he connected me to a recruiter who was closer to me.

All in all, I talked with about four different people in recruiting. All of them were incredibly nice and helpful.

My first "interview" was with the second recruiter. It was really just getting to know me, what my interests were, and trying to get a feel for my fit with the company.

After that interview, we scheduled a technical phone interview. They gave me two weeks to study up. Lots of review material was sent my way, which was awesome. I ended up rereading my algorithms textbook; it was quite a nice read, but I don't believe I would have done poorly on the phone interview even had I not read it. The tips and references they sent to me were extremely helpful. They sent me titles and authors of some amazing books; I recommend reading them, even if you aren't interviewing with Google.

After passing the phone interview, we had an on-site scheduled about a week later. This was much harder than the phone interview. I get the idea that the phone interview was just to weed out the weaker candidates.

The on-site consisted of five one-on-one interviews, plus one lunch "interview" where I was able to ask all of my questions. All of them were about 45 minutes each.

Every interviewer I talked to was very interesting, and we always had something in common to talk about. The questions were all very interesting problems. There was one point in one of the questions where one of the interviewers put a star next to a line I wrote to remind him to go back and follow up on a comment I made that sounded interesting. I enjoyed the interviews because it felt like I was back in college, talking to my peers about fascinating problems.

There were one or two interviews that I feel I didn't do so hot on. I only managed to get through one of the questions on two of the interviews. However, I figured they really just wanted to see how I approached the problems, so I made sure to explain myself very thoroughly.

I can't go into details about the problems.

But I wish I had studied my graph algorithms a little more closely.

Make sure you know your big-O algorithm classifications. Almost every interviewer asked me something to do with that.