I applied to the general new graduate Software Engineer position online via the jobs website. I was asked to take an online coding assessment that was timed to 60 minutes. It was unscheduled, and they requested I complete it within 6 days. A recruiter got in touch about 1.5 weeks later to schedule a phone interview. The recruiter asked about my GPA, who I knew at Google (for a reference), and my transcripts. They also asked normal questions about my other interviews or deadlines, visa sponsorship, etc. The phone interview was about 35-45 minutes long. The interviewer called me late and did not introduce themselves, they just jumped immediately into the first question. They also asked me to type my thoughts and responses into the provided Google Doc instead of speaking out loud too much, so that they could have a record. The question asked was related to summed area tables for 2d matrices of integers. The interviewer did not seem impressed or friendly and immediately hung up after we discussed the single question. The recruiter got back to me one day after the phone interview to let me know that Google wanted me to fly to the Bay Area and interview in person. The travel setup was easy and they paid for flights, hotel, meals, etc. The in-person interview was made up of 4 hour-long interviews with a lunch interview in the middle. It took place in Mountain View on the Google main campus. The interviews were mostly one-on-one and I was asked coding questions on the whiteboard, questions about my resume, and questions that required analysis of existing/provided source code. Some of the topics were parallel execution, algorithms / tree data structures, image processing, and C and C++. About 2 weeks after the in-person interview my recruiter got back to me again to let me know that the team was ready to make an offer. The offer was good and the position was located in the Bay Area. I negotiated the signing bonus and stock grant upwards by a fairly significant amount using several other offers I had in hand.

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."