A google recruiter cold-called me on 3 Feb 2011 (I guess they got my résumé from an old co-worker?) and I was kinda bored so I aksed her to send me more info about the job. The recruiter sounded eerily stoked on both the company and the project (kept describing it all as "exciting"). By the end of the next week we had scheduled a phone interview for 22 Feb. (I wasn't in any sorta hurry). Then I rescheduled the phone interview for a week later, 1 Mar. Shared google doc, the interviewer pasted some code and aksed me to find bugs in it and repair them. Some other question I don't remember. The topics were like race conditions in multi-threaded systems or something. It was nothing shocking, and the interviewer seemed to have a more muted stoke about working for google. Two days later, the ultra-stoked recruiter called back with a second recruiter to invite me for an in-person. The second recruiter sounded pretty hepped up on the brand-name too. I think the second was a more senior recruiter. We scheduled an interview for 2 weeks later, 17 Mar. They put me up in a hotel in Mtn View. The hotel was perfectly fancy, and had lots of nerd-themed items in the desk in the room (think weird Rubik's Cubes, puzzles made of heavy wire, &c). Next morning I woke up and drove to the googleplex. It was pretty, with ample parking, and a kinda agrestic setting. Flowers, vegetables, nerds. I waited in building 43 and watched people come in and out. it was easy to tell the difference between the home team and the visitors -- the googlers were the ones who looked super-jazzed, and the others looked uneasy. I mean, noticeably super-jazzed. The senior recruiter came `round and took me to the first interview room. I'd been scheduled for three interviews, but he told me they had found a fourth interviewer and would I mind staying longer for more probing. (I said I wouldn't mind.) The first interviewer came in, aksed a question about like statefulness in distributed systems or something, I wrote a big long answer on the board. he was mellow, genial, and helpful. The interview question wasn't too hard, and afterwards (when prompted) he expressed satisfaction with the company. He left, and another helpful, genial, and mellow engineer came in and aksed me some more basic cs stuff, and a question about how to build the back-end of a particular google product. She also expressed contentment with google as a place of employment. The guy who gave me the phone interview came and took me to lunch. We went to yet another building for my next interviews. A frankly-kinda-stressed-out-seeming engineer aksed questions about code prettification: namely, how to prettify the Java code I wrote on the white board. She took me to the next interview where a young guy aksed me a question about c-language bit-twiddling, and aksed a question about dynamic programming. my undergraduate cs courses were like 18 years previous, and I drew a blank. after futzing around w/ it for a bit, time was called and I drove home. I sorta figured that it would end there, so I wasn't suprised when they didn't call back. Two weeks later though, the senior recruiter called back to tell me they almost had all the interview reports, and that they just needed one guy's report before making a decision. Three days later, around 5 Apr, both recruiters started calling me and emailing me. I ignored them for a while, then finally phoned them back. They said they wanted me to talk with a few potential teams there to see if we could find a match. Over the next two weeks I spoke with six or seven folks, engineers and managers both. The tone of the calls went from testing my domain-awareness to openly soliciting my membership in their teams. Eventually (over the course of about a week) the recruiter reported the progress of my hiring order from hiring committee to I guess a second hiring committee to some kind of executive committee to the compensation manager to the executive approval, then they phoned me to tell me the nitty-gritty of the job offer. It was pretty good, so I accepted.