A Google recruiter cold-called me on February 3, 2011. I guess they got my résumé from an old co-worker. I was kind of bored, so I asked her to send me more information about the job. The recruiter sounded eerily excited about both the company and the project, repeatedly describing it all as "exciting." By the end of the next week, we had scheduled a phone interview for February 22. I wasn't in any sort of hurry.

I then rescheduled the phone interview for a week later, March 1. During the call, a shared Google Doc was used. The interviewer pasted some code and asked me to find bugs in it and repair them. There were also some other questions I don't remember. The topics were like race conditions in multi-threaded systems or something. It was nothing shocking, and the interviewer seemed to have a more muted excitement about working for Google.

Two days later, the ultra-excited recruiter called back with a second recruiter to invite me for an in-person interview. The second recruiter sounded pretty hyped up about the brand-name too. I think the second recruiter was more senior. We scheduled an interview for two weeks later, March 17.

They put me up in a hotel in Mountain View. The hotel was perfectly fancy and had lots of nerd-themed items in the desk in the room (think weird Rubik's Cubes, puzzles made of heavy wire, etc.). The next morning, I woke up and drove to the Googleplex. It was pretty, with ample parking and a somewhat rustic setting: flowers, vegetables, nerds. I waited in Building 43 and watched people come in and out. It was easy to tell the difference between the home team and the visitors—the Googlers were the ones who looked super-jazzed, and the others looked uneasy.

I mean, noticeably super-jazzed.

The senior recruiter came around and took me to the first interview room. I had been scheduled for three interviews, but he told me they had found a fourth interviewer and asked if I would mind staying longer for more probing. I said I wouldn't mind. The first interviewer came in, asked a question about, like, statefulness in distributed systems or something. I wrote a long answer on the board. He was mellow, genial, and helpful. The interview question wasn't too hard, and afterwards, when prompted, he expressed satisfaction with the company. He left, and another helpful, genial, and mellow engineer came in and asked me some more basic CS stuff and a question about how to build the back-end of a particular Google product. She also expressed contentment with Google as a place of employment.

The guy who gave me the phone interview came and took me to lunch.

We went to yet another building for my next interviews. A frankly-kind-of-stressed-out-seeming engineer asked questions about code prettification: namely, how to prettify the Java code I wrote on the whiteboard. She took me to the next interview, where a young guy asked me a question about C-language bit-twiddling and asked a question about dynamic programming. My undergraduate CS courses were about 18 years prior, and I drew a blank. After futzing around with it for a bit, time was called, and I drove home.

I sort of figured that it would end there, so I wasn't surprised when they didn't call back. Two weeks later, though, the senior recruiter called back to tell me they almost had all the interview reports and that they just needed one guy's report before making a decision.

Three days later, around April 5, both recruiters started calling me and emailing me. I ignored them for a while, then finally phoned them back. They said they wanted me to talk with a few potential teams there to see if we could find a match.

Over the next two weeks, I spoke with six or seven people, engineers and managers both. The tone of the calls went from testing my domain awareness to openly soliciting my membership in their teams.

Eventually, over the course of about a week, the recruiter reported the progress of my hiring order from the hiring committee to, I guess, a second hiring committee, to some kind of executive committee, to the compensation manager, to executive approval. Then they phoned me to tell me the nitty-gritty of the job offer.

It was pretty good, so I accepted.

They made me promise not to tell.

There were questions about:

• Thread-safety
• Computational complexity
• Dynamic programming

And other questions.