All the phone interviewer questions can be found here on Glassdoor. The on-site interview consists of five rounds: soft skills, technical communication, two rounds of coding (one easier, one harder), and system design (level of experience).

For me, all the coding questions were from GeeksforGeeks. One was about string matching, and the other was set partition. The system design question was about a basic information retrieval system, like a search engine prototype. If you are not familiar with this topic, the first chapter of "Introduction to Information Retrieval" will cover everything you need to know for the interview.

One thing I do want to mention is not to spend too much time looking at the prep materials your recruiter sent you. Nothing is from there, and they don't even point you in the right direction. GeeksforGeeks or LeetCode is the way to go. I heard Facebook and Google prefer LeetCode; it looks like LinkedIn prefers GeeksforGeeks a little more.

Most interviewers are very nice. For me, I had a hard time understanding the Chinese lady in one of the coding rounds due to her strong Chinese accent. Another interviewer told me he was pulled into this interview and hadn't prepared at all. It showed, as I realized he himself did not really know the answer to the question he was asking. We were kind of just trying to figure out a solution together during the interview; I'm not sure if this is the way it's supposed to be.

The system design round was a disaster for me because I don't have any background in information retrieval systems. I think it's funny because after the interview, I spent about two hours reading the first chapter of "Introduction to Information Retrieval," and that's all they were asking for. I just don't see how this is a good indication of my level of experience.

Also, the interviewer in this round was very inexperienced in terms of explaining the question, clarifying confusions, and having a respectful attitude.

Although the recruiter did point out that the interviewers may not be the people I will be working with if I get an offer and join them, I do want to say I found half of the interviewers not to be the type of people I would like to work with.

Besides the interview, I don't really like their work environment very much. Although the office looks nice, both the cafeteria and gym are very disappointing. They offer free food, but they put tons of oil into everything, probably trying to make you feel full longer so you don't eat too much. There aren't many healthy choices either, and the cafeteria is very small, crowded, and noisy. The on-site gym is practically a workout room, not a real gym at all, like those workout rooms that come with your apartment complex.

Not sure if you care about this, but most people working there don't seem to have a general sense of how clothes fit together to look acceptable. Another thing I noticed is there is a huge Asian population, which implies if you have low tolerance for accents, you may have a hard time communicating. Just something non-technical to think about.

Also, their office is kind of hidden inside the Google campus, so the traffic there is really bad. There are lots of speed bumps around that area, so driving won't be fun either.

They want me to design a scalable prototype of a basic information retrieval system.