I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google in Nov 2011
Interview
The entire interview was in Portuguese. It took almost 1 hour.
First, the interviewer asked questions about my past experience, but he kept interrupting me when I was explaining the projects I've worked, so please be succint in this part.
Next, he asked me to describe two data structures: binary search trees and hash maps. He asked questions about the Big-Oh details of these structures and where both could be applied in real world projects. Then he asked me to describe the various methods of handling hash collisions.
Then he moved to the main part of the interview, the programming problem: "Given a list of integers that fall within a known short range of values (like 7 values), how to find the median value?". After he asked how I would solve it without initially knowing the range of values. The first one can be solved by simply couting using an array with length equal to the number of values. The complicated one can be solved by using a Selection algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm).
I only gave a suboptimal answer to the complicated version of the problem. Also, I was very nervous and the interviewer kept interrupting me while I was talking. He had no patience at all and didn't let me think loud.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of integers that fall within a known short but unknown range of values, how to find the median value?
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in May 2011
Interview
I was contacted via LinkedIn with the opportunity to apply to Google. A current employee who went to the same university found my resume and sent it in. The interview process consisted of two, 1 hour long, back to back phone interviews. I was sent a google doc for both of them and was asked to write code into the document while the interviewer watched my thought process and coding ability on the other end.
The first interviewer asked me to code a very abstract algorithm, I think her exercise was more to see what my though process was than my coding abilities.
The second interviewer asked me to write out a few simple algorithms in code, then describe the complexity of the code. He then asked me how I could try to break my code and to implement the fixes for those edge cases. Finally I was asked if there was any way to rewrite the code more efficiently and what the complexity of that new version of the code would be.
It seemed to me like the first interview did not go very well but that the second one was much better, however I was sent an email about 2 weeks later saying that they did not have a proper fit for my qualifications.
Both interviewers were nice but did not express much emotion and were not very helpful when trying to talk a solution out loud.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked not to explicitly talk about the interview questions, but they involved live coding into a google doc and discussing the big O complexity of the algorithms used.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2011
Interview
After a brief phone screen consisting of a resume walk down, had two back to back 1 hour technical phone screen interviews. Phone screen interviews all consisted of technical programming challenges. Interviewers had me code into a shared google doc and explain my solutions as I went. Interviewers were helpful and provided clarification when needed, and even a few hints.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a base 10 number, print the hexidecimal (base 16) representation of that number.