It is evident these days that Google has started to drift from its vintage image of extremely talented and humble professionals with a near-perfect interview process to the more common tech pools of mediocre engineers who work hard to get into Google, more than just for talent. The recruiters (PhD interns) felt like they had to carry out interviews and scheduling forcefully amidst the thousands of applications they received. The interviews were so standard to an extent; I sometimes wonder how they would differentiate between a person who really has a good problem-solving and thought process and someone who has practiced those questions for hundreds of hours just to game the system.

The last interviewer went to an extent as to say he was volunteering because Google had asked him to. He pretty much had no interest in how interviews would be evaluated or whether a candidate was interested (implicitly telling me not to ask questions about the internship role and such).

The process from resume submission to rejection took 3.5 months for a PhD internship position. Just reflect on whether it is even worthwhile for a PhD, in the midst of their research program, to dedicate this much time for a rejection for an intern role, and for a role where they would at the end be matched to a generic project. (This could be worthwhile if you have no other options in case your PhD project prospects in industry are not good.)

Asked to reverse engineer and explain a Python code (written by the interviewer on the Google Doc). The code was essentially a cycle detection algorithm. I was then told to convert it to C++ code.