A friend who already worked at Google recommended me. I received an email asking to schedule a phone interview almost immediately after they sent in their referral.

The phone interview lasted slightly less than half an hour and involved solving a simple problem with linked lists.

They then flew me out to Mountain View and had me spend a full day interviewing with people from four different teams. The interviews consisted of:

• Two programming challenges
• One discrete math thought problem
• One data structures and algorithms problem

The data structure question was confusing because the interviewer couldn't keep track of what we were talking about. It was unclear whether we were discussing his ridiculously contrived thought problem (something about postcards and amnesia) or the CS problem it was obviously a metaphor for.