I was not looking to switch jobs, but I was contacted out of the blue by a recruiter on LinkedIn. I was happy with my job that I held with the same company since college graduation (10 years). However, I decided to give Google a shot. If anything it would probably teach me something about myself. The recruiter set up a phone interview for roughly 1 month later. I apparently did well as the recruiter contacted me about 2 hours after the interview to say I passed. I was forwarded off to a recruiter in Mountain View that set up an on-site interview for about 1.5 months later. I'm sure the time frames here could have been quicker, but for each step I wanted time to study. During the on-site interview, I met with 5 different engineers (4 where feedback was taken and 1 lunch interview). Each interview lasted between 45 minutes and 1 hour. I interviewed with members from 2 specific teams, the potential ones I would be joining if offered a position. Despite the fact the lunch interview was not supposed to count, I was told that the lunch interviewer was instrumental in getting me hired. It took quite a long time after the on-site interview until I received an offer. It took 2 weeks to collect interview feedback and 1 week to get the go-ahead to put me through the hiring committee. It took 2 weeks to go through the hiring committee and an additional week to go through the executive committee. At that point I had an offer, but it took another day or two to negotiate the details. I initially wanted to decline the offer since I was leery of moving my family, but the recruiter gave me the weekend to think about it. I verbally accepted after the weekend. It took another two days to choose a relocation package and 1 more day to receive a formal offer letter which I electronically signed. I hope I made the right choice! I am worried that I took a step or two down in responsibility, but the compensation was a little bit better than what I was making even cost-of-living adjusted. If anything I'll have an interesting experience to talk about and Google on my resume.

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."