I was first contacted by a sourcer through LinkedIn. The sourcer asked about what I liked to do and tried to see if there would be any teams or projects that would interest me. He let me skip the phone screen and went straight to scheduling an onsite interview. He then transferred me over to a recruiter who was based in Mountain View. This all sounded like it was going smoothly, but, oh, how wrong I was...

The interview itself was challenging but not impossible. I had five interviews, plus a lunch "interview." If I remember correctly, there were three interviews before lunch and then two after, each 45 minutes long. I think I did well in three of the interviews, and in two of them, I only did okay, maybe a bit below average. I was originally applying for a front-end software engineering position, so two of my interviewers had a few questions focused on the front-end, e.g., CSS, JavaScript, event handling, etc. The other three were generic software engineering questions that you would find in a typical interview. All of the interviewers were very nice, and I didn't feel uncomfortable asking them questions, although there's a chance I might have asked too many questions.

After the interview, my recruiter told me he would have an update for me by the following week. After a week went by with no updates, I sent him an email only to discover that his email address was no longer active. After some frantic emailing, I found out my recruiter had left for another role without telling anyone, so I was then assigned to another recruiter.

Recruiter #2 was very nice, but for about three months, all he could tell me was that they needed more information in order to make a decision, and was very slow to get more information (e.g., asked for references but didn't contact them until two months later). He eventually set up some project calls for me with four teams, and that went very well. I sent him my preferences for the teams, but he went on vacation for two weeks, so my application went nowhere during that time. He informed me that he was leaving for another role after he got back, and I would be assigned to yet another recruiter.

Recruiter #3 (who was awesome, by the way) told me that the hiring committee's schedules were weekly, and so I had to wait a full week between each of the remaining steps for any updates. Because this took so long, the hiring manager of the team I was supposed to be placed in had left for another role (there's a common theme here), and so I had to have more project calls to find another team. After all of this, I finally got an offer. I'm not exaggerating that the entire process, since the first message sent by the sourcer to when I got the offer letter, took six months. This was one of the most frustrating hiring processes of my entire life so far. (And maybe in the universe? Who knows?)

I still took the job, though.

I won't go into specifics (not that I'd remember them). For the front-end questions, you should be very comfortable with selectors and how to manipulate elements on a page. There were also some JavaScript-related questions about events.

For general engineering questions, I would say it's important to be comfortable with problems regarding 2D arrays (things like boards, keypads, etc.) and graphs/trees. Definitely know your big-O runtimes, since you will be asked for those, and how to optimize your solutions.