After submitting my resume, an internal recruiter contacted me and explained the interview process: 5-6 interviewers with individual grades forwarded to a hiring committee in California. I was given links to some interview questions, suggestions to read some books (e.g., "Cracking the Coding Interview"), and suggestions to attend a free on-site interview workshop.

On subsequent follow-ups, the recruiter then offered me a choice of interview dates, with suggestions as to when was preferable to get the "best" interviewers.

On the day of the interview, I signed into the building and met the recruiter, who escorted me to a meeting room with a round table and a whiteboard. Google has an eclectic office space that is the subject of several published articles. The NY Chelsea office has 7+ floors with themed areas (Lego, computers, etc.) of open cubicles intermixed with meeting rooms, cafeterias and snack centers, and social/gaming areas.

I was offered coffee, then chatted with the interviewer. On the board was the interviewer's phone number, a list of 6 interviewer names, extensions, and scheduled times. The interviews were 45 minutes each. There were 3 interviews in the morning, a break for lunch with a non-interviewer for Q&A, then 3 in the afternoon. The interview process was pleasantly and efficiently conducted.

The interviewers were personable. Most were young-ish, with a high degree of self-confidence, and had worked between 2-10 years at Google. Two emphasized their satisfaction of working every day with smart people. Interviewer experiences discussed were data crunching, parsing, optical recognition, hardware and redundancy, and data synchronization.

Sorting in general, with Big-O complexity.

Followed by partition sort (Quick Sort).

Finally, finding the k-th largest element without full sorting.