I applied online, and I believe I also applied through my university's career site. They responded quickly and asked me to complete a coding sample.

The coding sample consisted of two problems to be completed in one hour.

The instructions explicitly stated: "Do the right thing. We’re interested in your skills and do check for cheating, so please don’t use your professors’, coworkers’, or friends’ solutions or any other external resource for coming up with your answers to the survey or coding questions."

So I used zero external resources: no documentation, nothing. I thought this was appropriate since you don't get to look up docs during a whiteboard interview.

The algorithms themselves were simple. The really, really hard part was not having access to documentation. One can conjure up algorithms with just one's mind and maybe a pencil and some paper, but it is near impossible to conjure up the correct libraries and methods out of thin air.

After an incredibly hard time guessing method names and the like, my time ran out, and I was only on the first problem. I completed the problem on my own, using documentation; 'twas a breeze. I thought to myself, "It seems silly that an easy problem should be made so difficult by lack of documentation."

I contacted someone at Google and asked them to confirm that "any other external resources" included documentation. I was disheartened and surprised to find out that documentation was perfectly okay to use.

I told them what had happened, and they denied me a second chance but assured me that it wasn't a problem and that everything would be okay if I tried my best.

So I was obviously rejected. It's silly, but it's my fault that I had not spoken up before I started the sample. I just thought "any other external resources" really meant just that, and that there would be no exceptions to it.

I am 99% sure that I shouldn't be posting interview questions.