A Google recruiter contacted me after a friend referred me.

The recruiter then passed me directly to another senior recruiter, who told me that I could bypass the phone screen and go directly into the on-site interview.

I scheduled the on-site for one month later.

Around the end of September, I went to MV to do the on-sites. The traffic was terrible in the morning, and I was almost late.

When I arrived, the first interviewer was already waiting for me, so I started the interview right away.

All the interviewers were super nice and kind, so I wasn't nervous at all. Everything went well. The interviews felt like I was already a Googler, and the interviewer was like a co-worker. We talked about how to make a new feature or deal with technical problems. We talked and laughed; it was so much fun.

After the interviews, the recruiter contacted me right away, and I received my feedback three days later. Every feedback was excellent, so I passed hiring committee within one day, and then proceeded to team matching.

I learned a lot from talking with these team managers and picked one of them.

Later, I did the package negotiation. I received an extra bonus from my future boss, and the recruiter helped me finalize these details.

Besides, shout out to my Google recruiter! His work was excellent. He was super responsive and helpful the whole time, including scheduling coaching sessions and on-site interviews, following up on feedback, and coordinating with different teams.

NDA. But I can talk a little about what they were like.

I had 5 on-site interviewers. There were 5 questions with 6 follow-up questions in total. Every question required the interviewee to code it up.

The first interview included one system design question and one scalable algorithm question. The solutions were pretty open-ended and very interesting.

The second interview was all about algorithms. The first question was about string manipulation. I finished my code in 5 minutes and then I got another 2 follow-up questions, which were about string pattern matching.

The third interview was about OOP and graphs. It was not hard, but it required you to write a lot of code. I finished it in 20 minutes, then I got another 2 follow-up questions.

The fourth interview was a pure math question. It was kind of a brain-teaser. Figuring out how to deal with it took 15 minutes, but the code was relatively easy. The interviewer also asked me a lot of trivial questions during coding, such as explaining certain APIs and asking about the nature of the data structures I was using.

The last one was a pathfinding question mixed with string pattern matching. It was lots of fun doing it. I finished it within 15 minutes, then the interviewer changed the requirements and conditions of the question, and it became a dynamic programming question, which I coded.

That's all.