Recruiter contacted me on my old school email, said he had me resume on file from when I interviewed a couple of years ago. I talked with the recruiter very briefly over the phone. He described the role and asked me if it was something I would be interested in, seemed like a very heavy software coding role. I said it was, and then he asked for me to send an updated resume and he would setup the phone interview. Phone interview was setup for a week away. Interviewer called on a very poor phone line, and was probably on speaker phone. Luckily we moved to the google doc that was setup for the interview and when I could not understand the interviewer he would type the info on the doc. The interview was pretty straight forward.The interviewer asked three questions, two dealing with arrays, and one dealing with a linked list. I struggled a bit through the first question. I worked through it, and the recruiter asked the typical solution time complexity questions, and how can you make it faster, etc. Question 2 I struggled for about 5 minutes to come up with a solution. I was explaining to the interviewer my thought process as I was trying to come up with a way to solve the problem, but that just confused him and he asked if I would just code it, but I wasn't coding it because I had no ideas yet on how to solve the problem. :) After about another minute I came up with a solution. I started coding it and once the interviewer saw that once I had come up with a solution and was able to code it without a hitch he asked me to move onto another question. This was the linked list question, and I knew a solution right away and coded it without any issues. Somewhere in there he asked me "Do you have experience designing backend databases?" This is more of a question I would expect for a DBA role, not a typical Software engineer interview question. Anyway I answered him, and that was pretty much the end of the interview. He asked me if I had any questions and I did, and he gave a good answer back... This was my second interview with Google. The first one was a disaster, so I was pretty pleased with the outcome of this interview. I struggled a bit, but was able to answer the questions. Two weeks later I emailed the recruiter and asked if he had heard any results from the interview. He set up a time to talk and when he called he told me that I had done well in the interview but that they found another candidate better suited for the position. Overall a pretty good experience.

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."