The interview process went according to how it is described online elsewhere. As I was local and referred by a current employee, the HR initial interview was in-person and pro-forma.

The actual technical interview was a few weeks later, scheduled at my convenience. I prepared a lot but still found the questions very hard. I was able to write code for most of the answers, although in one question on recursion I got stuck and could not formulate the algorithm. The interviewers were very helpful and friendly. I guess my answers were not quite the top-tier of software engineering that Google requires, and I did not get an offer.

But it was a learning experience, and I expect that the programming studying I did in preparation will make it easier for other interviews.

To prepare, I read the following books:

• Programming Interviews Exposed (this was recommended by the HR recruiter)
• Cracking the Coding Interview

There were 5 technical questions. Four were coding and one was a systems design question.

One question was:

Given a schedule of flights, can you write an algorithm to count the minimum number of planes needed?