I applied online on June 9, 2014. After two weeks I received an email from a recruiter asking me to evaluate myself from 0 to 10 (0 being "no experience" and 10 being "super expert") on the following list: __TCP/IP Networking (OSI stack, DNS etc) __Unix/Linux internals __Unix/Linux Systems administration __Algorithms and Data Structures __C __C++ __Python __Java __Perl __Shell Scripting (sh, Bash, ksh, csh) __SQL and/or Database Admin __Scripting language of your choice (not already mentioned) _____ __People Management __Project Management I was really honest and evaluated myself a little low on almost all of them, except from Java, C++ and algorithms + data structures (which I thought were my strongest). However, the recruiter decided to schedule a phone interview with me. We agreed to have the interview on July 8, but something came up and I had to change it; she was really cool about it, and finally we scheduled for July 12. Some of the questions were: - What is the time complexity of Quicksort in the worst case scenario and in the average case? - What is the unix system call that returns file attributes about an inode? - Have you heard about linux 'tail' command? - Without using a calculator, tell me how much is 2 to the power of 24? The only one I got right was the first one =( because I read someone else's questions here, but I wouldn't remember otherwise. To be honest, if I needed to know any of that I would just Google it, but I don't remember it from 5 years ago when I studied them in the university. Also, it was a bit confusing because it was obvious that the recruiter was not a native english speaker, and neither am I, so sometimes I just didn't understand what she was saying, even after repeating 2 or 3 times. For example, on the 'tail' question I understood 'till' and of course I said I had never heard of it -.- In my humble opinion, it seemed more like an end of semester test rather than an interview. Besides, she didn't even ask me anything on the topics I evaluated myself the highest. At the end, she obviously concluded and kindly said that this was not the job for me.

The recruiter first did some screening by phone, asking a few technical questions and driving me through Google's "self-evaluation" in about 10 domains (networking, *nix internals, *nix sysadmining, algorithms, and various languages) (the recruiter had a good idea of how I *should* score). I was asked to narrow down where I would work. Google picked an interviewer from one of the would-be sites of employment for a coding interview done via phone and a shared document. After that I did a day of interviews at Google's offices. Lunch wasn't an interview but I was also accompanied by a Googler who let me ask questions about the work, office life and such (all interviewers did this, but the interviews rarely left enough time). Sent back feedback to the recruiter, who called me back when the hiring committee declined to make an offer. Unfortunately the recruiter gave very little feedback when asked, claiming it wasn't shared with them. The on-site interviews featured troubleshooting, coding, large-system design, plus a bonus topic of my choosing (SRE-related) and an extra interview which I think was picked where I ranked highest. My least favourite was the troubleshooting, since there was no actual terminal prompt and I was at the mercy of the interviewer deciding how the system was built, how it would manifest symptoms, and their understanding of how my commands would work. That interviewer had asked me to pick a small number of things to monitor, without deciding what the purpose of the monitoring would be. Aside from early interaction with the recruiter, and the fact that my interviewers had access to my resume, there was very little of the traditional HR approach to recruiting; this was almost all technical, and I was the only one asking questions about the more general fit. One annoying thing is that, aside from the recruiter, everyone called me from numbers that wouldn't answer back. This plus the distance made organising some things painful. It also means you have to write down anything you might want to ask in advance, because the people calling you are more prepared than you do.