During most interview rounds, I had a positive experience and enjoyed speaking with people. The interview rounds generally followed this structure:

• The interviewers introduced themselves and mentioned where they work.
• They then allowed me to give a brief introduction.
• They started with a warm-up/easy coding challenge and incrementally increased the complexity.
• They offered a whiteboard or a Chromebook laptop for coding.
• They let me ask some questions at the end of the round.

I went through 5 rounds, plus lunch with a Googler. The food was good.

I enjoyed all interviews but one. An interviewer, let's call him "NoWay" (not his real name, of course), came to the meeting room. He did not provide any background on where he works. Instead, NoWay suggested we jump right into the coding.

While I was analyzing the problem, NoWay looked at his laptop, clearly reading something and answering chats/emails. He was clearly not concentrating on what I was doing or saying; I had to repeat some questions a few times. I assumed his strategy was to fail me no matter what. So, I asked if NoWay was in the room with me or somewhere else.

After a pause, he looked at me and answered affirmatively.

They did not collaborate during the interview and did not let me ask any "last questions". That was probably the worst interviewer I've encountered in my life.

Problems related to:

• Parsing an expression like "(2+2)*2".
• Permutations with finding real English words in the dictionary.