Google

I was contacted by a recruiter within two business days of applying through a referral. I scheduled a technical phone interview for about 2.5 weeks from then. I could have scheduled it for earlier, but I wanted to spend enough time studying. The interviewer called me more or less on time, and we stayed on the phone while working with the same Google Doc. I did a simple warmup problem for 10-15 minutes, and then went into the main problem, which was a rather abstract dynamic programming graph problem. The phone interview was intended to be 45 minutes total, but I went over an hour.

My recruiter let me know within 24 hours that I would be moving on to the onsite. We scheduled a phone call, and she explained in depth what the rest of the process is like. She also covered some housekeeping details, like my current location, the type of work I'm interested in (front end, back end, mobile), and projects I'm interested in as well. I scheduled my onsite in MTV for two weeks after this (again, it could have been just a week after, but I wanted ample time to practice more). My recruiter also scheduled for me a Google Hangout coaching session with an engineer for the following week, intended to help candidates prepare properly.

The onsite went smoothly. I had two interviews before lunch and two after. My last interviewer, in particular, extended the reservation for the room so that I could finish the full code for the problem, which was rather complex. Everyone I interacted with (4 technical interviewers, lunch interviewer, recruiter) was really friendly, and I actually felt pretty relaxed throughout the whole experience.

The recruiter was able to collect all interview feedback within 4 business days and called me to let me know that the Hiring Committee would be reviewing my case the following day. The next day, I found out that I had been recommended for hire! It took about 4 business days after that for the VP approval, compensation approval, and SVP approval to be completed, and an additional day for me to actually receive the offer letter. I was told that having a competing offer made the compensation approvals take longer than they normally would have.

Other than how long it took to receive an offer after the onsite, the overall experience was pretty streamlined, and I had a great time. I signed two days after getting the official letter and will be entering the project matching phase soon.

Notes on preparation: I prepared for technical interviewing nearly full-time for about a month. I reviewed my old data structures book from college, made sure I knew the particulars of the programming language of choice, and did all problems for the data structures, recursion, and DP, and medium & hard sections from Cracking the Coding Interview. I also did most of the problems on Interview Cake. I got a lot of whiteboarding practice and made sure I analyzed every problem for space/time complexities, and also considered alternative solutions and the corresponding trade-offs.

I signed an NDA, but there were a number of recursion and graph-based problems.