Having already been in contact with a Google recruiter, I was invited to do a two-hour in-person interview. I would meet with two engineers for one hour each.

The first interviewer took me on a five-to-seven-minute tour of the Seattle campus. This allowed us to chat for a bit and break the ice before getting into the meat of the interview.

Then we stepped into a meeting room. He asked one technical, whiteboard-coding question, with a couple of minutes remaining for me to ask any other questions. The process was the same with the second interviewer.

The interview went really well with the second interviewer. I talked and worked my way through a solution to the complex problem he asked, which tested my ability to identify precise expectations, clearly define problem scope, and use the most appropriate data structures whose inherent properties were best suited for the problem.

It went less than ideally with the first interviewer because I stumbled a few times while attempting to design a solution to the graph traversal question. Once I wrote a solution that I was pretty happy with, he noticed a flaw, and we walked through an example where my solution did not work. I began to explain my mistake and write the code to address it, but we ran out of time before I could design a fully working solution. Bummer.