I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Very smooth. One phone screen and they flew me in for a full onsite. Usually they have five interviews. I had four because one interviewer had to leave early due to external circumstances.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Given a preorder traversal, create a binary search tree in optimized time
2. Implement hasNext and next for a list of lists
3. Given a circle with N defined points and a point M outside the circle, find the point that is closest to M among the set of N. O(LogN)
4. Given two sets of intervals, return a combined set
5. Threading related questions
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I was contacted by a google recuiter via email, which asks whether I am interested in participating tracking (computer vision terminology) projects inside google. When I replied positively, the recuiter asked me for a initial phone screen. We talked briefly over google hangout, and he decided to waive my technical phone interview, and bring me onsite directly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked by to interpret a piece of code, which, according the interviewer, need knowledge of Z transform in order to understand. I believe the reason behind this strange question is because the group I was interviewing with is Chrome media, and they require a lot of signal processing techniques in daily work.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Google
Interview
Phone interview was not challenging. On site interview is challenging in that they expect your code to be very clean and for you to answer quickly. If you share your thought process in a clear, concise manner and think quickly, you should do fine. Their recruiters are pretty unresponsive. If you complete the interview and don't get frequent follow ups, expect to not get hired.