I was contacted via LinkedIn with the opportunity to apply to Google. A current employee who attended the same university found my resume and sent it in.

The interview process consisted of two, one-hour, back-to-back phone interviews. I was sent a Google Doc for both, and was asked to write code into the document while the interviewer watched my thought process and coding ability.

The first interviewer asked me to code a very abstract algorithm. I believe her exercise was more to assess my thought process than my coding abilities.

The second interviewer asked me to write out a few simple algorithms in code, then describe their complexity. He then asked how I could try to break my code and to implement fixes for those edge cases. Finally, I was asked if there was any way to rewrite the code more efficiently and what the complexity of that new version would be.

It seemed to me that the first interview did not go very well, but the second one was much better. However, I was sent an email about two weeks later stating that they did not have a proper fit for my qualifications.

Both interviewers were nice but did not express much emotion and were not very helpful when I tried to talk through solutions aloud.

I was asked not to explicitly talk about the interview questions. They involved live coding into a Google Doc and discussing the Big O complexity of the algorithms used.