I applied online with an employee referral and also spoke to an engineer at a university career fair.

About a month later, I was offered an on-campus interview, which consisted of two 45-minute interviews.

A couple of days after that, I was invited for an on-site interview in Seattle, which consisted of three 60-minute interviews.

Since I had a competing offer, I was informed of the decision three days later by phone. The recruiter informed me that the hiring committee did not approve my hire.

The process was quite drawn out, considering I originally applied in early September, and they only gave me an hour to respond to my competing offer.

Google HR can be surprisingly disorganized. For example, half of the interviewers had an outdated copy of my resume on hand, from an application I had submitted three years prior.

Signed NDA and will respect the NDA.

For a new grad, they focus primarily on CS fundamentals, so know your data structures and algorithms well. However, be able to think through your code design in terms of scalability, even if they don't ask you to parallelize the code.

I think they test the same concepts as Microsoft does, but I'll summarize the difference between the two companies without revealing any coding questions.

Microsoft will ask you questions like, "If apples cost $2 and bananas cost $3, how much does it cost me to buy 3 apples and 2 oranges?"

Google will ask you a question along the lines of, "If apples cost $2 and bananas cost $3, and I have a $1 million dollars, how many unique fruit combinations can I buy?"

Simply put, Google questions are more in-depth and require more thought and finesse, even though the same concepts are used in solving them.