The recruiter contacted me the same day my friend referred my resume. Since I had previously applied, the recruiter let me skip the phone interview.

They brought me on-site one week later, and I met with six different interviewers (two of them in a joint interview).

Most of the questions were pretty standard. I had prepared from the book "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley, as well as www.careercup.com.

There were strictly technical questions – thankfully, no annoying brainteasers. A few interviewers asked me to analyze my own algorithms and suggest any better possible approaches. Heaps and trees stood out as the most important data structures. The design question was open-ended, and it was one of the questions from the CareerCup site, so I wasn't caught off guard.

Afterwards, it took about two weeks to receive an offer. The recruiter was good about keeping in touch and kept me updated as my application passed through the local hiring committee, then the executive committee.

Given Google's reputation for a difficult hiring process, I was surprised that it took only three weeks from beginning to end.

Interview Questions:

• Object-oriented design question
• Binary tree coding question
• Sorting question
• STL vector question
• A few others (cannot reveal due to NDA)