Applied online and received an email within a few days by a Google recruiter. A technical screening interview was organized for the following week. A Google engineer called me and started by introducing himself and Google, then went quickly into the programming question. I managed to solve the problem using recursion within about 40 minutes with only a few hints. After 1 week, I received an email for onsite interviews which was organized for the second week after. The first onsite interview went well. I actually recognized the interviewer from my previous university. The programming task involved class declarations and pointers. I believe I did ok with this question but ran out of time to really give a solid solution. In my second interview, the interviewer gave me a few hints since I was not making progress and I eventually solved it. Then it was lunch with another engineer. My third interview was the worst. He asked me the same question as the 1st interviewer, and I said I had already been asked that question. He then asked a different question that I did not fully understand which direction he wanted to go and in the end it was an SQL command question. I made a mistake in the third question he asked: I started coding before I had fully considered the entire question. The 4th interview was a presentation of my work. This went smoothly and the interview was very cordial. The 5th interview went well although I ran out of time. 2 seemingly simple coding questions. Even though it was past time, this interviewer kept talking about the groups within Google so I thought I did well with this guy. Overall I managed to solve all the questions but with hints. I believe I did well with 3 interviews, 1 ok, and 1 bad.

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."