Interviewed Feb 2007 in Mountain View, CA (took a day)

Communication with the company were great. The recruiter was timely in her responses to email queries and was very friendly to deal with. The phone interviews (2) were appropriate in length and in content and the interviewers were only time.

The onsite interviews were also well planned and well scheduled, everyone was on time. I had 5 or 6 1:1 interviews during my day and they all asked different types of technical questions. The only nit I would pick was that the focus was entirely technical, it seemed like no one really cared about my personal or career growth or what I really wanted to do.

The actual hiring process is what I had the most problem with. Google insists on hiring really smart people and putting them on somewhat random projects. During the interview process they will tell you nothing about what you'll be working on, in fact they don't even know until the day you start! This is ridiculous when you are trying to hire engineers with difficult to find specialty skills. These same people are getting compelling offers from other companies who are willing to let them work on stuff in their domain of expertise and are willing to tell then what they'll work on.

Google treats all of its new hires like they are fresh out of college. I.e. they are smart, but have little experience so they'll be ready to just work on anything just because its Google. Sadly this is simply not true of the more experience senior people out there.