I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Sydney) in Sept 2012
Interview
The initial recruiter was excellent. She got me very excited about Google, but may have misinterpreted my interests a little (putting me in SRE instead which seems somewhat sysadminish for a developer).
I had 2 phone interviews and got asked to interview in Sydney. The interviewers were excellent, although again there was a focus on system administration stuff which I made clear was not a strength or interest. The coding questions were good, and I particularly enjoyed the algorithms/big data questions which they saved for last.
Unfortunately the guy I was assigned to for lunch let the whole group down. He was arrogant, unhelpful and made me hope this kind of person didn't represent the usual lunchtime/peer situation.
After a long waiting time, Google asked for yet another phone interview which I really struggled on. I had been interviewing elsewhere given how long they'd taken to get back to me, and scheduled the interview after another. I did poorly and was getting quite frustrated with the Google process.
Finally after another long wait, they suddenly requested my transcript, which took some time to dig up. Another Google department gave me a phone interview almost exclusively based on Javascript despite my clearly stating I'd written about 10 lines in my entire career. This was similarly misinterpreted, and I never heard back from that department again.
Eventually I was told to try again in 12-18 months.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Transmute one word to another by the shortest path of 1-letter changes through a path of actual words.