The process: Recruiter contacted me via Linkedin, had some phone/email conversations, then talked to someone at Google to decide to apply or not. Had a phone interview then on-site. The on-site was 5 separate interviews plus lunch. The process is pretty long, though the turnaround between phone interview and on-site was quicker than other steps. One of the flaws of the process is that they don't have things together... the phone interviewer didn't know if I'd been notified about the phone interview (he hadn't when he interviewed) and so we didn't use Google Docs for coding - just more general questions. Something like 3 of my on-site interviewers were replaced last-minute, room confusion, lateness, etc. Follow-up with recruiter tended to be a day after it was supposed to be. The coding questions are much like you've seen on this site and others. There was a focus on tough general algorithms questions. I understand that they like to use variations on actual problems they've encountered, but they seemed to be (mostly) artifacts from such a heavy focus on distributed computing. I don't get to do distributed computing in my normal duties, so I was unprepared. The other downside is that there seemed to be too much focus on computational complexity and not as much on readability, maintainability, development time constraints. The hardest part is that placement doesn't happen until the time of the offer. So you don't know if you'll actually want to go until you're really invested in it. My advice for interviewers: Work on hard graduate-level algorithms problems to prepare, slight focus to the weird sorts of things you have to do for distributed programming. If the interviewer is asking you a design question, make sure they clarify what they're actually for. My advice for Google: Try to mesh the questions with the candidate's background better. Give more clear in-interview feedback about whether the solution is adequate, how it could be better. Allow for more time for the candidate to ask questions. There's no downtime at all for almost 6 hours, so maybe an easy question after lunch? Give more detailed feedback about specific weaknesses. Spend some time convincing the candidate that this is a good fit for their experience (or not) - without a job description you don't even know if it's interesting or not. All this sounds very negative but you can really feel the excitement on Google campus.