Went though someone who already works for them so they were able to tell me more about the process. Got a call from a HR person whit a breif chat to determine if I was serious about it. Was emailed a "rate yourself out of 10 for the following skills" which I filled in. Next week, a 45 minute call which was 20 mins of someone giving a monologue about how great working for Google is, followed by about 20 fairly random questions mainly concentrating on the skills I put as being good in. Next week first proper 45 min phone interview which was solve a single large problem along with many questions asking about details of how things work and guesstimates of speeds of various tasks. Next week second proper 45 min phone interview which was coding in an online Google docs document in pseudo-code. Involved 5 tasks each building on top of the code you have already written. Some trying to lead you into traps. Some discussion of performance. Followed by a couple obscure questions about low level libc functions I never heard of. Two/three weeks later, an onsite interview from 10AM till 3PM. Five interviews. One writing algorithmic code on paper followed by general discussion of algorithms and data structures. Second was debugging a printed out code piece of code with a very obscure bug inside, followed by a discussion of open source projects. Third was describe security methods that you know of, how can you make ssh less vulnerable to attacks, explain the internal operation of init. Then there was a free lunch and a guide around the office followed by the fourth which was a remote video one in one of their rooms. This was looking heavily at server profiling and solving weird Linux issues. And the final one was with a manager who asked things like "what will you bring to the team". Everyone kept saying how you just need inteligence but many questions were very much, if noone taught you this, you will not know it. While answering the question which was something only someone who was a data-centre admin would know, I figured out a solution after a couple prompts and was quite pleased with that. Later I was told by my friend that that was a fail. They do want you to know the answers before and no lateral thinking will help you.