I applied online and after a month, I received an email from the HR manager. He wanted me to explore career opportunities at Google.

We had a nice video call. He was very positive and gave me a lot of confidence for the interview, which was scheduled a month later (I was on vacation during the initial process).

This was a technical round that lasted for an hour. The interviewer directly jumped into the technical questions after confirming my name, without any other preamble. It was a basic algorithm question with some tricky parts.

I felt he wasn't observing my code until I made some sort of sound.

The way he interviewed was completely in contrast to what I had heard and read about Google interviewers.

Twisters with palindrome strings