Recruiter started off professional. Originally contacted by someone in Mtn View and then transferred to someone in Santa Monica. Phone interview was intense, but I did my best. I felt like I got most of the questions wrong. My interviewer walked me through any incorrect answers and overall it was a pleasant experience. The interviewer was very good. Most of my questions were about searching and sorting, about half of them were the stupid questions from their database. He asked a good 10-15 questions during our phone call but most were short. Unlike most people, for some reason I was not asked any coding questions. The on-site interview was a disaster. 1. It started with a discussion of my thesis topic which was fine. Expect them to understand your topic no matter how esoteric or specific it is. 2. A second interviewer asked about my thesis. He did not like my topic at all claiming that it doesn't scale well. Well, excuse me for not having access to Google's data! Then proceeded to ask some dumb questions (specific to Java) from their database. Finally, I started coding on the board. If I did something wrong, he was very misleading in the "hints" that he was trying to give; he could not articulate what the problem was with my code. 3. I had lunch with my phone interviewer. It went fine, but Google food is not all it is cracked up to be. The others that I met during lunch seemed stressed out, but friendly. 4. No comments on next interviewer as he was pretty good. 5. HORRIBLE interviewer. Very arrogant, very condescending, very intimidating. He asked a very esoteric question that was very confusing and required me to read a manual before attempting to answer the question. He was very rude and mean to me and made it clear that he did not want to be there. I really just wanted to walk out of the room. 6. At this point I was shot. This interviewer asked me a question and while I was coding, I did something wrong. She said the problem was giving her a "headache" so we would move on to something else, just like that. The next question was better and was more pleasant. My recruiter told me to use whatever language I was most comfortable with. I specifically asked if I could use Python and she said "yes". I know Java, C and C++ but they are not my everyday languages. To my dismay, most of the questions were phrased "Used Java" or "Use C, C++ or Java" or "use C or C++". One of my interviewers did not even know Python. My first recruiter KNEW point blank that Python was my everyday language and said that was perfect for this interview. Apparently, I should have never even been recruited since I do not program in Java/C/C++ as an everyday thing. I was also told that the interview is about how you "think" which is not at all true. You need to know very specific things about algorithms, design patterns, and object-oriented programming, so read books before the interview. I was told that I would hear within a week. I never did. I had to call the recruiter and she pretended that she was going to tell me my result that day anyway. The recruiting process is wrought with bad information and too much power is given to the recruiters. Until they get this right, they will continue to hire the mediocre people that I have read so much about.

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."