Employee referral. Got a mail from the recruiter and we organised a phone screening, positive. We moved to a phone interview with a product manager, positive. At that stage the initial recruiter (top class!) handed over to someone else (not as good as the previous one) and we arranged for a onsite interview with 4 product managers and one engineer. Despite me asking for a few key areas to prepare, I was given a few deeplinks pointing to a very distracting number of other links most of which were possibly 10 to 15 years old on scalability and system engineering. Quite difficult to focus and really understand what the interview was going to be. I was also given a link to a book that feels more like making someone earn royalties rather than being actually a good book to read and learn something out of it. The onsite interviews were almost surreal. 1st guy was pretty ok. Possibly the only one who was slightly interested in my CV and my past work experiences. 2nd guy possibly did not look into my eyes for more than a millisecond as he was too busy typing at his laptop, hopefully his considerations on my answers. Pretty awkward though. 3rd guy was the system engineer, he explicitly told me to answer as if I was a PM, not an engineer. Then the feedback he gave was that I was not as technical as an engineer. Lunch break was in company of another PM who's supposed to answer any questions I might have had. He couldn't really be bothered, and he told me he did not even need to go through the interview process as he used to work for a company that Google bought and he ended up working there... In the meantime the 3rd guy was having lunch on his own and looked pretty depressed. 4th guy was a very senior PM, originally from the US, he asked where I was coming from and it was clear he did not know london at all. He told me he lives 5 min walking from the office in King's X and doesn't know London much, after several years he lives here. 5th guy also working for a startup that was bought by Google and he used to work for Amazon too. He spent almost 10 minutes saying terrible things about Amazon prior to start the actual interview. Not sure why Google wouldn't want people sharing the content of the interviews, as if that's their own property. In fact, it would be pretty impossible to perform well on the onsite interview if you don't know what to expect, considering that your past experience is completely ignored and disregarded and all that counts is the candidate answering in a pretty standard way to the pretty standard questions you might have read somewhere else. And there's no way you would be able to resolve any of those estimation questions if you don't get a clue from previous readings. All in all I was disappointed when I got the negative feedback but frankly I'm grateful it went that way, I don't think I would have been happy working in that environment. Google is a great company for sure, but it felt very awkward in their attempt to feel unique, different while they don't care about your past and demonstrated achievements.