Recruiter reached out to me via email claiming to have been looking at potential graduates from my college. She invited me to a casual phone interview where she asked me various questions about my interests. She asked me for available times to do a technical screener before coming on site.
We planned out a call a few days later and the interviewer had me on Google Docs programming a solution to his question. The question was regarding an algorithm applied to search trees. I started off well creating the necessary data structures and taking the input tree, started the algorithm, but stumbled a bit towards the end. The interviewer passed me a few hints and asked me a few questions, but I didn't fully complete the whole problem. Very nice guy.
Phone call about a week later informing me they would fly me out, rental car and all, expenses paid. About a month later I was in person interviewing the early morning. The whole interview process in person took 5-6 hours total and there were 4 seperate interviewers.
The first session started out kind of rough.
Gentleman came in and expressed he wasn't supposed to be the one actually interviewing me, and that the other one called in sick. Because of that, he realized he couldn't submit his work to launch a project so it would be delayed. He seemed very frazzled and we hadn't even started. But, I put it out of my mind when he got to the question and tried to not care. He presented me a string manipulation/search question and I progressed through it the best I could. He was very responsive, always asking me what I was trying to do at every step and I felt encouraged to talk out loud even if I was facing the whiteboard trying to do the problem. Time ran out, but I had a basic solution. We didn't get around to answering a whole optimized solution. He let me ask questions about his job. Out of everyone, he was the most enthusiastic and encouraging about working at Google.
The next interviewer came in and she explained that someone would be joining us as a shadow, learning how to perform interviews. He sat there quietly the whole time and took notes. She, however, felt very off putting even compared to the first interviewer. She asked me a question and I proceeded to replicate what I did with the last interviewer who encouraged me to think aloud. I couldn't tell if she was listening though. She would stop me and ask me to explain what I was trying to do, even though I had just explained out loud! So there was a bit of tension. Coupled with the fact that I had never encoutered her first question, she pushed me away from the problem mid-strategy and provided a second problem. Which I felt I did okay with instead but she still exhibited that same behaviour.
At that point, I went to lunch with someone from the Search team. He was very nice and answered all my questions. He, however, never really seemed enthusiastic. Neither did the previous 2 interviews I noticed. No one was showing me ENERGY that they wanted to be at Google or how fantastic it was or how they loved their job. No one was gushing, and it seemed like everyone, even at lunch, was just being herded around. I started to get cold feet... Lunch was pretty good otherwise.
The third interviewer sat down and asked me a question I had kind of dealt with before. It was a pairing algorithm and I felt I did much better with this one. He, however, was on the computer for the most part typing away like he was working on something else. I don't think he ever looked at what I was working on while I did it. He sat in a position where he probably couldn't even see what I was doing on the whiteboard. Which concerned me. He chimed in maybe once or twice to 'check in' on my progress. But he never let me ask questions about what he did either. He took a picture of the board before leaving.
The last interviewer was just as enigmatic. He was very nice though and provided me a bunch of questions - mostly identifying and replicating unique array traversal patterns. I went through them and he responded to me as if I had nailed them all. He even went 'overtime' to provide more questions, and he was all 'yes yes very good'. He showed me out a backdoor, and I was in the middle of the Google campus by myself. No recruiter followed up to see how it went or anything. I just.... meandered out. I explored a bunch of the beautiful campus, but it was an odd ending.
I got a phone call about a week and a half later - the only contact I had since. And they said try again next year. In fact, she expressed I "came close".
I'd reinforce that the questions were fair, everyone seemed nice (especially the recruiters themselves by the way), but no one was bursting with energy about the place or their work. No one tried to encourage me in a way that was like "you want to and should work here!" like many other companies I've been to have shown. It was definitely an interesting experience...
