I first had two technical interviews by phone that went quite well.
Then I did an onsite (I live 10 miles away from their campus) that consisted of 6 sessions of interviews.
Despite the claim that Google no longer uses puzzles in interviews, I found that 2 out of 6 interviews consisted of solving tedious puzzles. I would say that 4 of the 6 sets of interviewers were friendly, one fellow was outright cold, one was slightly negative.
Interviewer 1 (solo): Friendly and enthusiastic.
Interviewer 2 (solo): Friendly but not enthusiastic. Seemed to want to hire a different type of person more like himself.
Interviewer 3 (solo): Rather cold. He did tell me he knew that I'd interviewed at Youtube earlier, which felt creepy especially because the more memorable interviewers at Youtube were creepy. Imagine being reminded of a BAD experience. Right after which, he presented a tedious puzzle! When I was solving his puzzle, I felt I was constantly interrupted and hounded. I wanted to ask him to please be quiet, but I judged from his attitude that could have ended the interview prematurely. In the Q&A part, it was revealed he had never heard of Google's Project Ara. Maybe he was having a bad day... at my expense.
Interviewer 4 (lunchtime casual talk, solo): Friendly and enthusiastic. It was a relief to talk with him after the previous guy. A big relief...
Interviewer 5 (solo): Moderately friendly, presented a puzzle. I solved it. I got a feeling he seemed to want to hire a different type of person more like himself.
Interviewer 6 (solo): Someone quite like myself. Only person to ask intelligent/wise questions and took notes.
To Google's credit, there were no team interviews (that I recall).
Long after the interview, I got emails from Google asking me to help them improve their interview process. That's why I came to Glassdoor....
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given some input data consisting of sets of increasing numbers, match patterns where the sequenc of deltas between the numbers match.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in Jan 2015
Interview
Flew me into NYC for interview. Quick meeting with HR & then five (or was it six?) 45 minute white board sessions with engineers with a lunch break with another one. I'm terrible at those things--in fact, I'd never done anything like it except for meetings on systems design--brain froze up in the middle of the first one and I never really recovered.
If you're an older developer, the process can be quite alienating. First off, I'm not sure if you summed the ages of any of the two people I met up, it would equal mine. The guy they sent me to lunch with (my turn to ask questions, learn about the culture) was younger than my son! He was a great guy, but perhaps some senior person in HR with grown kids should try this sometime. Second, the brain-teaser at the whiteboard approach just wasn't the way we learned to tackle problems (I started coding in the early eighties). There are already enough criticisms of this hiring strategy, the irrelevance of these kinds of questions to the real requirements of getting systems running in production, and the "brogrammer" culture it fosters elsewhere, so I won't go into it. Criticism notwithstanding, you can't argue with their success.
Only once all day was I asked to talk about something I had accomplished.
Everybody I met was likable and nice. Much to their credit, the interviewers were understanding of the brain-freeze-at-whiteboard problem and I never got a smart-alecky smirk in five hours. The lunchroom was outrageous, and I would have stuffed myself if I hadn't three interviews left.
This interview model is endemic in the industry. If you are over fifty, good luck out there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The usual (I've since learned) careercup type interview questions, can't remember the particulars: brain-teasers painted with a coding question patina.
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Google in Nov 2014
Interview
The interview process was really professional, after discussing the process with the recruiter over phone, I got a phone interview with a google engineer. I was asked two question during the phone interview, both about string parsing.