I was contacted by a recruiter from Google Southern California (Irvine and Santa Monica) through LinkedIn and was asked if I had any interest in applying to Google. I replied yes and then had a phone call with the recruiter (about 40 minutes) to talk about my background and experience, and the recruiter talked about the interview process and answered all my questions. The recruiter was amazingly nice and very easy to talk to. The first thing I had to do was choose an office to apply to. I chose Santa Monica and asked for 2 weeks to study before the first phone interview. Two weeks later I had the phone interview. I was very nervous but my nerves calmed down as soon as I started talking to the interviewer, he was friendly and the interview felt more like we were a team working on a problem together rather than an interview (to some extent). It was very casual and the problems were interesting. The interviewer gave me a few tips and clues when I got stuck, but overall I felt like I did pretty well. One week later, the recruiter contacted me to announce I passed the phone interview and was invited to an onsite interview at the Santa Monica office. The onsite interview was scheduled for a week after that (so 2 weeks after the phone interview). I arrived at the building, but they have 3 buildings and I showed up at the wrong one! Way to make a good first impression, I felt so stupid. So if you have an interview there, make sure to follow the directions they give you by email instead of googling "Google Santa Monica" for the location. The onsite interview consisted of five 45 minutes 1:1 interviews back to back with a lunch with an engineer in the middle. Four of the interviewers were male software engineers in their early 30s, one was older (50s). All of them were nice and friendly and made the experience very pleasant. All but one of the interviewers made me feel like I was already part of the team and that we were just working together on a problem. The lunch was a little more awkward. The guy was older than me (50s) so we didn't have much in common (I am in my late 20s) and he was very hard to talk with. I had some questions and conversation topics ready to make sure the lunch would go smoothly, but I ran through all my questions in about 10 minutes because he only answered with "yes", "no", or a few words. He never asked me anything or made any effort to keep the conversation going. You could tell he was a nice guy, nothing wrong with him, just not a talker. Seems like a weird choice for a interviewee lunch, the whole thing felt like an uphill battle against awkward silence. The lunch was probably the most stressful part of the whole interview day! At the end of the day, I left the onsite interview feeling confident and happy. The problems had all been interesting and I really did enjoy most of the interviewers. One week later I received an email from the recruiter saying I was not selected for the job. I think I did pretty well, I guess I was not quite quick enough with my answers.