After submitting my resume, an internal recruiter contacted me and explained the interview process: 5-6 interviewers with individual grade forwarded to a hiring committee in California. I was given links to some interview questions, suggestions to read some books (e.g., "Cracking the Code Interview"), and suggestions to attend a free on-site interview workshop. On subsequent follow ups, the recruiter then offered me a choice of interview dates with suggestions as to when was preferable to get the "best" interviewers. On the day of the interview, I signed into the building and met the recruiter who escorted me to a meeting room with a round table, and a white board. Google has an eclectic office space that is the subject of several published articles. The NY Chelsea office has 7+ floors with themed areas (lego, computers, etc) of open cubicles intermixed with meeting rooms, cafeterias and snack centers, and social/gaming areas. I was offered coffee then chatted with the interviewer. On the board was a the interviewer's phone number, list of 6 interviewer names, extensions, and scheduled time. The interviews were 45 minutes each. 3 interviews in the morning, a break for lunch with a non-interviewer for Q&A, then 3 in the afternoon. The interview process was pleasantly and efficiently conducted. The interviewers were personable. Most were young-ish, with a high degree of self-confidence, and had worked between 2-10 years at Google. Two emphasized their satisfaction of working everyday with smart people. Interviewer experiences discussed were data crunching, parsing, optical recognition, hardware and redundancy, and data synchronization.

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."