I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Jan 2010
Interview
Google basically does not care what you have done, and doesn't interview you for any particular position. They mainly want to know if you are talented at answering academic computer science questions. Does this build a good company? I don't think so, but it's up to them to decide that, I guess. Six interviewers asked me incredibly detailed data structure and algorithm questions. Nothing that anyone asked me would have distinguished me from a recent graduate. I thought I did pretty well, but apparently not well enough. My recruiter sounded as surprised as I was that I didn't get an offer. Apparently anyone who interviews you can veto - so it's everyone's loss that one of my interviewers was a terrible interviewer. Be sure to buy, and at least skim, a copy of "Programming Interviews Exposed; Secrets to Landing Your Next Job" (Mongan/Suojanen/Giguere?), recommended directly by Google recruiters. Best of luck.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Let's say you have a lot of numbers and you want to sort them. What do you do?
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Nov 2009
Interview
Applied for an entry-level engineering position online. Was contacted pretty quickly by an HR rep, who checked my basic credentials (school, when I could start, etc) and scheduled two phone interviews with engineers.
I was expecting some of those weird "Google" questions like "How many ping pong balls can fit in a school bus?" but apparently they don't ask anything like that anymore. Most of the questions were about algorithms and data structures, so definitely brush up on those. (Hint: when in doubt, just say you'll use a hash table)
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
How can you find a cycle in a singly-linked list (a place where the last node links back to a previous node)?
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2009
Interview
Don't bother reading these questions. It won't help. Google's interviews are set up such that the questions either have impossible answers, or the problems are changed so much looking them up won't matter. You just have to have very solid computer science fundamentals and show enthusiasm. For such a large company, the interview process feels so ad hoc that it almost deterred me from accepting an offer. I ended up accepting, but I'm hoping the interview process will be improved so others won't make a decision the other way.