I applied online and got a response from a recruiter almost immediately. After that everything went very slowly. The entire process has taken 2 months and the worst thing – communication with my recruiter was almost completely broken: I did not receive responses for several days; the recruiter scheduled phone calls and did not show up, etc. From the very beginning I had the impression that the recruiter is not very interested in dealing with me. I was treated as a low priority candidate. May be it's because of the lack of internal referrals. I think, I could be a very good match for Google: PhD with strong math background, excellent GPA, 15+ years of continuous coding experience, patents, lots of cool research projects I worked on in the past including projects related to the position I was applying for, Google's culture fit, strong desire to be a part of Google. I did very well during the phone interview and was invited for the onsite part. I think onsite interviews (4) went very well too. What really surprised me is that interviewers asked lots of questions about my experience. Problem solving part was not very challenging. This was a little bit disappointing. Tasks were routine and not very well though-out. Solving a difficult problem you have a chance to shine. When you are dealing with an easy problem it's all just about how fast and accurate you are in white-boarding. I cannot say I was absolutely perfect, but I am sure I did not fail any single part, although sometimes I experienced problem understanding what the interviewer really wanted to see. Interviewers were nice and friendly. I did not have the feeling I was dealing with stars. Several times interviewers were even not up to speed with my ideas and my concern is they might not be able to record everything accurately. I was waiting for the feedback for 3 weeks. By this time I already had an offer from a big Google's competitor, but I was patiently waiting for the "job of my dream". I don't know what really happened during these 3 weeks. According to the recruiter, she was collecting interviewer's responses. It strange, since it sounds like my case has not even reached the hiring committee. After 3 weeks the recruiter scheduled a call where she told me they would not move forward with my candidature, because "I did not walk through problems well enough". I do not agree with this conclusion, since I got the opposite impression from my interview. My guess – the reason for the rejection was something else. After all I am extremely disappointed. My recommendation to other candidates: think twice before applying for a position at Google. It takes too long and the result is very unpredictable. They are not just looking for smart/skilled/passionate. Evidently there are some hidden criteria. And don't trust Google's articles and videos about their recruiting process too much. They present their understanding of the perfect recruiting process. The reality is very different. The other advise is try not to spend too much time describing your experience and asking questions. You have only 45 minutes and you will need this time to work on algorithmic problems. I typically had no more than 25-30 minutes left for problem solving and I was usually given 2 tasks. Note that coming up with a right idea and implementing the main functionality is not considered a complete solution. For the record they want to see 100% completed code. If you've run out of time just because the task selected by the interviewer was too large for the timeframe, it's your problem. Interviewer is always right. The phrase "did not walk through problems well enough" in my case could easily mean "proposed the right solution for the second problem, but did not finish writing the code in time".

Direct onsite because I interviewed in the past and did well that time. From the time I sent my resume to interview day: 2 weeks. From interview day to offer over the phone: 2 weeks. The syllabus for the interviews is very clear and simple: 1) Dynamic Programming 2) Super recursion (permutation, combination,...2^n, m^n, n!...etc. type of program. (NP hard, NP programs) 3) Probability related programs 4) Graphs: BFS/DFS are usually enough 5) All basic data structures from Arrays/Lists to circular queues, BSTs, Hash tables, B-Trees, and Red-Black trees, and all basic algorithms like sorting, binary search, median,... 6) Problem solving ability at a level similar to TopCoder Division 1, 250 points. If you can consistently solve these, then you are almost sure to get in with 2-weeks brush up. 7) Review all old interview questions in Glassdoor to get a feel. If you can solve 95% of them at home (including coding them up quickly and testing them out in a debugger + editor setup), you are in good shape. 8) Practice coding--write often and write a lot. If you can think of a solution, you should be able to code it easily...without much thought. 9) Very good to have for design interview: distributed systems knowledge and practical experience. 10) Good understanding of basic discrete math, computer architecture, basic math. 11) Coursera courses and assignments give a lot of what you need to know. 12) Note that all the above except the first 2 are useful in "real life" programming too! Interview 1: Graph related question and super recursion Interview 2: Design discussion involving a distributed system with writes/reads going on at different sites in parallel. Interview 3: Array and Tree related questions Interview 4: Designing a simple class to do something. Not hard, but not easy either. You need to know basic data structures very well to consider different designs and trade-offs. Interview 5: Dynamic programming, Computer architecture and low level perf. enhancement question which requires knowledge of Trees, binary search, etc. At the end, I wasn't tired and rather enjoyed the discussions. I think the key was long term preparation and time spent doing topcoder for several years (on and off as I enjoy solving the problems). Conclusion: "It's not the best who win the race; it's the best prepared who win it."