A friend referred me, which began the interview process: an initial casual conversation, a technical phone interview, and then on-site interviews.

There were two recruiters for the duration of the process, with the switch-off happening between the technical phone interview and the on-site interviews.

I really enjoyed having these friendly recruiters as my point of contact because it made the interview process as smooth as possible and kept anxiety to a minimum.

The on-site interviewers (other software engineers) were friendly for the most part, and I left with a good impression of Google.

I didn't expect there to be a question about databases, though it was listed as one of the potential topics I would be interviewed on. It was naive of me to think they'd tailor questions to only what I might have learned, given I had minimal computer science education and most of my experience came from work.