I was first contacted by Google in 2012, a couple of months after I took up my current employment. This recruiter was energetic, interesting, and seemed genuinely interested in finding the right spot for me at Google. Unfortunately, I had just started my new job and have a personal policy of staying at a place of work for at least a year. That, and the project was interesting and exciting, so I did not follow up and let him know why.

Time passed, and eventually, he moved on from Google. About a year later, another recruiter contacted me. She seemed nice but nowhere near as enthusiastic. We set up a time to talk over a Hangout, but unfortunately, she canceled at the last minute. Not good, I'd changed my plans around to fit. So I agreed to her request to set up a new Hangout the next week. Nothing happened. After about two weeks (I waited due to work commitments), I got back in contact with her, and we worked out a new time, and the interview went ahead. She was courteous and seemed reasonably enthusiastic, but nothing like the previous guy, who had a specific position in mind. No, this was now very open-ended and non-specific, and I started to feel like just another candidate. Despite this, I decided to see where it went.

So, a technical phone interview was set up, and it was possibly one of the worst phone interviews of my career. I could not hear a thing. The call quality was terrible. This made it extremely hard to hear what I was even supposed to be doing. Fortunately, the Googler on the other end was very helpful, polite, and understanding. We eventually worked out what he wanted me to do via Google Docs.

Then I waited over two weeks for feedback. I passed the interview but was then transferred unceremoniously to recruiter the third. This guy was even less enthusiastic, but communication was clear and to the point. He ignored my request to talk to him over Hangout. But the second interview got organized with a team I was interested in.

The second interview, however, was far worse than the first. Call quality was better but still not great. Worse still, however, was the interviewer who seemingly had zero interest in being there. He explained what he was looking for, a basic problem, and for the rest of the interview, ignored most of my questions. I was trying to talk through the problem, explain what I was doing, and also try to see how he would work with me. From what I heard, I'd expected this from a Google interview. And indeed, the last interviewer was great. However, this guy did not answer my questions—aside from some grunts—and seemed more worried that I wasn't using STL. I told him I just wanted to keep it simple as it was a simple question.

Did I forget to mention that he was a full 15 minutes late to the interview? I cannot stand this, and it is disrespectful and very tardy. Also, the question asked had nothing to do with the specific position I was interviewing for.

In the end, I have no doubt I gave a sub-optimal impression in my second interview. But what do you expect from a sub-optimal interview? Garbage in, garbage out. So, in the end, I did not get an offer.

While I understand that I am perhaps in the minority here as far as Google interviews go, I can see from the stats that I am certainly not alone. From my experience, I can only conclude that Google does not take its recruitment seriously, and it has big issues with its process.

They were only of average difficulty.