The process was very, very slow.

A friend sent my resume in back in January. I spoke with three different recruiters from February to May.

They had trouble figuring out which groups might be a fit, and frankly, the first recruiter clearly never understood what I do.

The final group interview request came from a group I never would have applied to directly, and after I had already accepted another job.

I went simply out of curiosity to see the rest of the Google process.

As it turned out, one of the interviewers is someone whose work I've admired for a long time, which turned things around.

Once I was in the process at the in-person interview stage, there was a huge improvement in the interaction.

I've rated this "negative overall," but it would more accurately be: 4 months negative and 1 month positive.

Most of the time was spent on questions asking you to consider a hypothetical problem and design a system to meet it.