A Google recruiter contacted me to schedule a phone screen interview. I set it up for a couple of weeks later because I was too busy at work.

The questions during the phone interview were not very difficult, but I could definitely have done better if I had had more time to prepare. I should definitely dust off algorithms, data structures, and read some coding-related interview books. If I took a couple of months to do that, I'd definitely ace this.

The interviewer was very nice and gave a hint when he felt I needed one. Although I came to a solution, it wasn't optimal. There was also a coding question, which we did through a Google Doc. Make sure to take time to double-check all cases for coding solutions.

After the interview, I found that the problems were part of a standard list of Google problems.

• Find the median of a very large dataset distributed over several network nodes.
• The coding question was something about writing an iterator.

Find the median of a large set of numbers distributed over several machines in a network.