I greatly anticipated this interview. Many engineers, including me, want an opportunity to work with the best and the brightest. But the interview went wrong in many ways, and it changed my mind about wanting to work at Google. The on-site interview consisted of three 45-minute sessions.

• The recruiter was incredibly slow. It took almost three weeks for the on-site interview to be scheduled. He often promised to get back to me tomorrow, then I wouldn't hear from him for five days. It was frustrating working with him, but I kind of expected this, as my friends who interviewed before had similar experiences.

• The first interviewer had a strong accent. I couldn't understand him, so I had to ask him to repeat many times. I felt like I was being rude, but thinking back, his inability to explain the questions cut into my time to answer them. Then he asked me to review some C++ code. Wait a minute, I am a Java programmer, and the recruiter said the interview would be conducted in Java. The last time I used C++ was seven years ago. I explained this to him, but he insisted. I gave it my best shot while struggling with syntax.

• The second interviewer was arrogant and rude! He seemed like he didn't want to be there. Again, he asked me to code a problem that is only relevant in C++. I gave the best answer I could in Java. He argued with me that it would not work, then I had to explain to him that a null assignment in Java also deallocates a variable because of garbage collection. He wouldn't admit he was wrong, so he made a degrading comment about how Java programmers know nothing about memory management. Then he asked a harder question that basically required putting everything in a hashmap and checking for a match. He rudely interrupted me while I tried to explain my thoughts. At one point, I literally got a little angry. I happen to be a pretty patient and non-confrontational person. I think he had a canned answer in mind, and he didn't want to listen to anything else.

• The third interviewer was seven minutes late, but he was nicer. He seemed cocky about working at Google. Many things he said started with something like, "At Google, this is how we do things..." The questions he asked were a little confusing. I had to ask many follow-up questions to understand them.

If they are looking for someone with C++ skills, then why waste half a day of my time? After meeting these interviewers, I recognized that my friends who work at Google have the same arrogance. It's the same arrogance a Microsoft recruiter once showed me when I first graduated from college. Look at where they are now. Google is on track to become just like them. If this is what Google represents – a prestige-driven, egotistical cult – then I don't want to be a part of it.

Remove a node from a singly linked list without knowing the head node. All you have is the node itself.

Find a sequence with the maximum sum in an array of negative and positive real numbers.