I received a phone call from a recruiter.

We talked for roughly 45 minutes about my technical background and experiences, as well as the sorts of positions that are currently available in Software Engineering at Google.

This was followed up one week later by a technical interview that consisted of two programming questions and almost no other discussion. I received my negative response from them a few hours later.

I completed both questions with a little time to spare and without receiving help from the interviewer. The two shortcomings I saw in the interview that could have led to their decision not to move forward were:

• I briefly forgot the syntax for array declaration, as it is not something I commonly use.
• I decided to use a brute-force iterative implementation rather than the more complex recursive solution to the problems.

My advice to others would be to make sure you're 100% refreshed on the syntax of the language you will be interviewing in, and it may be worthwhile to attempt the riskier, flashy answer rather than the more basic solution.

Without going into specifics, I was asked questions about manipulating arrays during the technical interview.