I was approached by a recruiter through LinkedIn. We first had an informal call, whereby after some general chat he asked me if I'd like to proceed to a tech part, which I did. There were a sequence of questions related to networking, processes, and linux administration, but not deep-diving, more like probing the overall orientation. After this call we agreed to follow up with a tech interview call.
The tech call included two relatively involved but still fairly easy questions related to navigation through tree and graph data structures. The next day I was called and invited directly to an onsite.
The onsite consisted of five whiteboard problem solving sessions, with a lunch in between. The coding tasks were fairly easy, but the interviewers did not ask to optimise the solutions, which turned out to be the killing point, as they expected me to be proactive and suggest improvements without asking. There also was a NALSD session, and a troubleshooting one. Both of which apparently went worse than they expected, though also better than I anticipated, given hardly any previous experience.
Overall, the process was very smooth, with Google showing amazing patience for my limited availability. The recruiters were very friendly, the interviewers very kind, and the questions interesting and challenging. I did catch one of the interviewers on not really knowing the details of the internals he was asking about, which surprised me, as did the outcome, since they were a bit picky while showing some ignorance themselves. Nonetheless, I feel they were all very engaged, experienced, smart people, genuinely interested in learning about my skills.
The entire process took a long time, but that was because I specifically asked them to wait for me to be available, which they did without any complaint, what I can only wholeheartedly admire.
