I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2013
Interview
Contacted via linkedin. Phone interview scheduled, then onsite the next week.
Questions:
Phone interview
1. You want to provide internet access to 90% of the population of Africa - How would you do it?
2. You want to design a phone for deaf people - how do you do it?
Onsite:
5 interviews + lunch.
5 Interviews - 3 PMs, 1 Director, 1 Engineer
PMs + Director - Design/thinking areas probed.
1. Design an alarm clock.
2. 100 floors in a building - 3 main occupants - top 10 floors (company 1), next 90 floors evenly split, top 45 company2, bottom 45, company 3. Design the elevator system.
3. 8% drop in hits to Google.com. Larry Page walks into your office asks you to think about what the reasons might be. Enumerate.
4. Tell me about the most difficult interaction you had at work.
5. Name a non-Google product you've recently used - what do you think of it, how could it be improved. What if a feature you designed and managed is deemed to have poor ROI - defend it and the analysis of the data that is presented to you.
6. How many reviews are written in a month on yelp.com. You have no data and no access to any data. Estimate.
7. Design a car for blind people. Enumerate the use cases. Prioritize them. Justify everything with sound logic.
Engineer:
Design a simple load balancer for google.com. What data structures would you use? Why? Define access/delete/add complexity (Order of) for each data structure and explain your choices. Design an algorithm to add/delete nodes to/from the data structure. How would you pick which server to send a request to? Why? Why not?
Design the Google search service - essential pieces, logic, discuss why/why not/tradeoffs.
Lunch: Very friendly PM, had joined Google 2 months earlier. Had 10+ years experience.
Overall a pleasant and challenging experience. Was told by recruiter that they'd be in touch within a few days. Waiting to hear back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
4. Tell me about the most difficult interaction you had at work.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Google (New York, NY) in Mar 2012
Interview
Phone interview for 30-40 minutes with basic work experience in product development then was invited back to NYC Google office for a full day interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Did my research and went pretty much what others have said about the G interview process.
I applied through other source. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Google in Sep 2013
Interview
I was contacted via email through my LinkedIn account, asked if I'd be interested in a Product Management position at Google. I initially thought it was spam, so was short with response, asking questions. Once I realized it was legit, I said "sure"!
I had a phone call with the staffer - only 15 minutes long. No hard questions - essentially just verifying things on my LinkedIn profile. Then the staffer set up a 45 minute call with a PM for the following week.
I studied all of the goofy brain teasers that other reviewers have shared - was dreading the call because of that...
But the call came and the PM was friendly, encouraging, and thoughtful. No brain teasers - just talked about business. It was a 45 minute interview - we talked for an hour. I actually enjoyed talking with him.
I got an email a couple of days later from the staffer thanking me, that my resume was forwarded on to the hiring manager and they thought "I'd be a better fit in a different department". The staffer said that they would follow up if they found a fit...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain how certain product decisions were made on previous product development cycles.