Google (Senior) Software Engineer interview questions

There were a number of separate interviews with separate developers through the day with a lunch-time non-counting interview. The questions were all about puzzles that you could easily look up (I had seen them all before in the various books), and only one interviewer at the end of the day in the last five minutes of that interview even bothered to quiz me about my unique skills, a specialty that I was told Google was looking for and why I even chose to accept the interview in the first place. I went through the puzzles, writing my answers using brute force solutions rather than jumping to the conclusion not only because I felt it fair but also because I began to see the whole day as a waste of my time since it became apparent they were more interested in playing games than testing my skills.

Phone interview, then 2 interviews at a branch office close to where I lived, then some 5 interviews in a day in the office I applied for. Interviews are technical, be prepared to solve concrete problems, may involve coding, complexity of algorithms, system design. Interviewers are more or less free to ask what they think is relevant, so one interviewer asked about concrete numbers for how long a certain algorithm would run (i.e. expected some basic knowledge about typical hardware), others wanted to know complexity of algorithms or problems in concurrency, or what the most exciting thing was that I learned. If you write about what you did prior, be prepared to answer detailed technical questions about it.