The Google interview process typically includes one or two phone interviews and an on-site interview, taking anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month. Since I had a pending offer from another company, they expedited my interview, skipping the phone screen and the hiring committee review. I received flight information two days later, flew out, interviewed the following day (Friday), and had an offer by Monday.

At the on-site interview, you are put up in a very nice hotel and provided with a rental car. GPS is recommended, as navigating the Mountain View/Sunnyvale suburbs can be challenging.

The Google campus is simply spectacular. It features dozens of buildings, with bikes available for transportation between them, buses serving different neighborhoods, multiple dining cafes, and multiple gyms.

Google also has offices located all over the country and the world; you can choose your preferred location if the Mountain View suburbs aren't your cup of tea. Projects and teams are distributed across separate offices.

As for the actual interview:

• Five separate 45-minute interviews with other Software Engineers. The interviewers come from a wide range of backgrounds (infrastructure, front end, etc.).
• The questions were all technical in nature, mostly coding oriented.
• They did ask pointed questions about previous experience, projects, and general resume items.

The interview questions were well thought out and relatively innovative. The interviewers presented them clearly and were very helpful in discussing solution possibilities. Some questions were straightforward, but the trickier ones were excellent. We were able to devise solutions and optimize them multiple times, discussing the merits of different approaches.

Everyone I spoke with was upbeat, intelligent, and nice. The last interviewer I had seemed a bit surly at first, but quickly warmed up and became very affable.

The hiring process was very informative. The recruiters provided ample information when asked and were very upfront about many aspects of the company. The interviewers themselves could answer many questions about the gritty details of working at Google.

The hiring itself is actually done by a separate group of people from the interviewers and is decided somewhat higher up the chain of command.

Google asks interviewees not to share specific details about interview questions. The questions were coding-oriented and required a varied set of algorithms and data structures to solve, especially including graphs, heaps, linked lists, and hash tables. Sorting algorithms were also emphasized.

Some of the interview questions were quite unique but could be abstracted in neat ways.

Google does provide a significant amount of material before the interview(s) to help you study. This includes links to reading material and information on the types of questions you can expect.

The questions were relatively difficult, but the interviewers were helpful.