Applied online with a referral from some Googlers I know in January 2018.

Got a phone screen by early February, passed that, and went onsite in late February. Standard Google interview: five coding questions of varying difficulty. I had fun with some and screwed up others, and didn't get an offer as a result.

Overall, you get the sense that Google recruiting is an incredibly efficient, well-oiled machine. The only delay was on my end, due to some personal matters that came up between my phone screen and onsite. I felt that I could have gone from application to onsite in about three weeks, which is wild.

I also got the sense that, for the SWE role, they're really not looking outside the box. It's a square hole, and they're really only looking for square pegs. So, you better be ready to give a top-notch SWE interview performance, regardless of whatever else you might bring to the table.

The most difficult question was probably a graph traversal problem that I didn't realize was a graph traversal problem until far too late.