I applied and was contacted by a recruiter within two days. I was given a long checklist of things to review and told I would have a phone interview in about ten days. I prepared quite a bit, but there's only so much you can do. You have to be a little lucky with who you get and hope you both find the same topics important.

That said, I've been told the interview process at Google is a bit silly, and I have to agree. It did not feel very kind, at least. My interviewer started with, "Hi, I'm an Engineer at Google, and you have an interview scheduled for this time. Is this still a good time? Okay, good. Let's start with the following question." Very little small talk, straight into a coding question. Okay, no problem. Except I could hear him typing away on his keyboard the whole time. There was basically zero commentary while I was coding, and nothing to say about my "thinking out loud."

I completed the question. Perhaps it took a bit longer than it should have, but it's an interview. Nerves are going to play a part. Anyway, I was definitely being scored on a timer. There is little doubt about that in my mind. If I wasn't given a timed score, then I lost points for there not being enough time to get around to other questions.

He did go through it line by line, and I fixed all the little mistakes (which, of course, never would have happened in an IDE) and wound up with some decent code. It wasn't the best thing in the world, but it was fast and it worked.

After the weekend, I was told they would be going with some more experienced candidates. So, again, little doubt in my mind that my score was somehow lessened due to the amount of time I took on the problem. I didn't sit and do nothing; I just wrote out code, then replaced it with something cleaner or better. I moved some sloppy stuff into a new function, etc.

Google asks that we do not share their questions, so I won't share the entire thing.

I will, however, say that it was a common question (think along the lines of reversing a string, calculating a Fibonacci sequence, etc.) with a little twist thrown in. This twist should just cause you to hesitate and think a bit, even if you've seen the core of this problem before.

It was, by all means, a fair question.