I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google in Sep 2009
Interview
I interviewed at Google for a full-time Software Engineering position after graduation.
As I informed the recruiter that I had a pending offer already, they skipped the initial interview and brought me in for a full-day interview.
I met with 5 engineers: two 45 minute interviews, an hour lunch, and two more 45 minute interviews.
There was very little discussion about past experiences and my resume. All 3 out of the 4 interviews involved a programming question that I had to solve on the white board.
The last interview was an abstract systems design question.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given an array whose elements are sorted, return the index of a the first occurrence of a specific integer. Do this in sub-linear time. I.e. do not just go through each element searching for that element.
Given two linked lists, return the intersection of the two lists: i.e. return a list containing only the elements that occur in both of the input lists.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Google in Aug 2007
Interview
Was recommended by a former colleague and called for a phone screening by a recruiter. Recruiter asked a few relatively basic technical questions. Was then contacted for another more in depth phone interview. I believe this was still with an HR person, not anyone from engineering. They asked more in depth technical questions. Was able to answer all but one of them but eventually answered it with some hints. Was not ever called back.
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2009
Interview
The recruiters are very proactive and professional. The interview is mainly about design, problem solving and brainstorming. The questions are not the classical programming ones I saw from websites, but one definitely has to know the basics such as sorting and complexity to come up with good answer.
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