Submitted resume, called by recruiter in Mountain View. Initial phone interview with someone onsite at Boulder. Some C++ questions, some graphics questions. Was invited in. The recruiter wanted me to come in for two separate interviews, but, quite honestly, I balked. I've done the M$ thing and knew that I might not do well with the superficial quiz style interview, so it just wasnt worth spending two vacation days on. So I negotiated a one day interview. The interview was standard M$, google stuff. Quizes. If you do between average and good, the interview decides if they like you and passes or fails you. If they don't like your handwriting, they might fail you. If they don't like the way you talk, they might fail you. If you do worse than average, they fail you, if you do better than average, the pass you. If you shine it on effectively in the first few minutes, maybe you will pass. In their attempt to be quantitative, they have basically created one of the most superficial and subjective interview processes in the industry. Which is why normal companies don't let tech people design HR processes. But whatever.... My talent is tied to a combination of left and right brained skills. My true innovation is mostly right brained, and I have been an important force in disruptive innovation at my last two positions. My left brain has powered me to a phd in mathematics, but I do not breathe instant and pure precision....it coalesces over a short period, longer than 45 minutes. My code comes out absolute top quality. Google can have the mindless calculator types.... The recruiter calls back 3 days later and says they 'don't have enough data (?) and want me to revisit for 1.5 hours.' After thinking about saying no (maybe I should have), I am able to schedule this at the end of a day, and go back in. Same superficial interviewing style. Two days later, recruiter gets back to me saying 'not a strong enough match'. The whole thing felt like a waste of my time, honestly. I have other places to visit that actually want to talk with me, get to know me, and let me get to know them.... I liked the people better than the M$ people, however.... Not as much blatant arrogance and a few old timers who probably had a clue.

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."