For those impatient to read, in a nutshell: I found the interview process (as a non-US citizen) extremely long, very tedious, and in a sense dehumanizing. During the phone interviews, you get code questions, write your answers, and very little else matters. Overall, the whole ordeal was very life-draining. Comparing with peers going through it simultaneously, it was very focused on a specific type of developer/engineer: without exception, very experienced people were rejected.

Google can hire whom they please, but if they know the profile of the person they want to hire, why bother contacting people with 10+ years of experience only to reject them all later? It's a waste of time for them, and even more so for the interviewees. One could arguably say it is disrespectful as well.

For those who care for all the details:

I was contacted by a recruiter in mid-2012, asking if I was interested in discussing a position. I am not a US citizen, so I was dumbfounded. Of course, I was interested, but why would they contact me then? (I had sent a resume to Google Brazil years prior, with no response).

A month after I responded, I finally heard back. We agreed, because of my project and their timelines, to start the process in December. Apparently, someone had recommended me and wanted to remain anonymous. So, I had about 5 months to practice Portuguese again, brush up my resume with competitions, study, and gain Android experience.

During that time, I started to learn that certain other people in my country had also been contacted, some with a similar set of skills and experience. So, it was clearly a larger, coordinated effort, not just an interest in myself. This made sense, but it also made me more wary.

December came, and I contacted the recruiter once more. They requested that we start the process in January. So, New Year's was spent studying, and January arrived. I finally got a call. I was expecting a technical interview immediately, but instead got another screening (similar to the one the year before). After some email back and forth, a coding interview was scheduled for mid-February.

The interview itself involved a coding problem with some calculations, and I thought I had blown it. To my surprise, I was contacted again the next week, and another interview was set for the beginning of March.

That one started with the engineer unable to call my phone; I had to call him internationally and explain how to reach me. Some 15 minutes were spent there. Then, I finally got some web system design and scalability questions that (with guidance, mind you) I think I answered successfully. I felt much better after that interview.

But weeks rolled by with no response. I was a nervous wreck, so I wrote back asking about the status (as April was a deadline for H1B). Eventually, I got a response that, because of the engineer's feedback, the process was over for me. I honestly appreciated getting the response, but obviously, I was not happy.

I was taken aback, but what surprised me even more was that engineers I consider better than myself were also getting interviews and also didn't get much further. The pattern seemed to be people with plenty of experience (10+ years), multiple team positions, and a history of leadership as well. A pattern hard to ignore.

In the end, as I said, the experience was very life-draining. I would not enter into it again lightly. Consider a hiring process that takes months and months (unnecessarily, e.g., 3 months for 2 coding interviews) – that is not a good indicator of the health of the hiring workflow.

Splitting a search query between different machines