A recruiter reached out to me. I had an initial call with the recruiter to gauge my interests and my team preference at Google. We narrowed it down to two teams. I had a couple of phone interviews; I guess the first one was on the fence. The first phone interview was about API design and algorithm design. The second was for designing and coding an algorithm and verbally describing a game design. The second one went well enough to move me to the next step.

The primary recruiter handed me over to a secondary recruiter. It's clear that the primary recruiters are friendlier and take more time to get to know you better. The secondary recruiter didn't seem very enthusiastic. He set up my interviews with members of the two teams I had narrowed down with the earlier recruiter and referred me to a travel agency to set up the travel for the onsite interview.

I was booked for a total of 5 interviews, 3 before lunch and 2 after. Lunch was in Google's cafeteria with another employee, separate from the interviewers. The campus has a very nice college feel to it.

Interview questions ranged in difficulty. When they saw I was solving questions with ease, they turned it up a notch. I found a very heavy emphasis on graph algorithms in my questions. I was expecting it, but not to this level, so better prep for those, especially graph search algorithms and their variations. There was lots of code writing on the whiteboard, to the point where you run out of space! I had to design a data structure with certain properties, and the interviewer kept asking for new methods. One of the interviewers had a thick accent, and it was very hard to understand him. That was the only interview that I felt went badly because of the communication issues.

Overall, it was a positive experience. I got to brush up on a lot of things that I had forgotten since college.

Test line-of-sight in a game that accounts for obstacles to determine if the bad guy can see you.