I was contacted by a recruiter who saw my resume from a previous application and liked it. He requested an updated resume and some transcripts, then scheduled a phone meeting to talk to me.

After we spoke, we set up an online coding test (language of my choice) for me to take. It was two questions in 60 minutes.

It was pretty challenging, given the time constraint. I finished the first one but did not have time to fully debug the second. I thought I blew it, but received a call that they wished to move forward with me.

There was also a brief personality quiz I had to take. It was pretty standard HR stuff.

After this, there were two phone interviews, each with a Google engineer. A Google Doc was opened, and I had to write code for 45 minutes on the spot. I had to talk through my responses with them. They want to see that you know how to think.

After this, I was flown out to California for the onsite interviews.

There were four interviews and a lunch with an engineer. They asked you questions, and you coded on a whiteboard. The interviewers didn't seem very interested in you as a person, and there wasn't much personality. They were simply grilling you on coding ability.

My first three interviews went great. I solved the problems and had time to optimize them. On the last interview, my interviewer was eight minutes late. He did not speak great English and seemed eager to be finished with me. He let me misunderstand the problem and go in the wrong direction for 20 minutes before saying something. I had to start over and managed to just get the main parts of my code down (still uncompilable) before time ran out. I am quite sure this interview is what ruined my chances.

I received a call about a week later that they did not want to move forward with me as a software engineer. However, as I was still a good candidate, they wanted to consider me for their residency program. The program is similar to a post-graduate internship, where they give you three months of classroom learning and nine months of project work, then evaluate you again afterwards to see if they want to hire you. As I already had some great offers from other companies, I declined.

Overall, the experience was positive. I just wish it hadn't taken so long and my last interviewer had been better.

Cannot describe under NDA.

Study algorithms and data structures.