"Hello from Google", a firsthand interview experience
These are the kind of posts that you see in Quora or Forbes, how to nail that Google interview; this is a firsthand experience with me.
How I did it? I simply applied. That's it. To be honest, I was not expecting an answer, it was some sort of experiment. I think that having an impeccable resume helped, but there was no magic or secret. A few weeks after I applied I received an email from Google, titled "Hello from Google", asking me for my availability for the first interview.
The recruiters were excellent and very understanding, and I felt comfortable at all times. They made an excellent job of making it feel casual rather than formal. The interview, of course, was through Hangouts.
The recruiter also aided me with some complementary material that helped me tremendously.
Now, to the rough part. I applied to a front-end job opening, and the interview, of course, was hard. The interview was through phone and in a live coding fashion. The interviewer was seeing in real time my code through a simple Google Docs. There is no IDE, Fiddle, or anything, just your head.
They test your capacity of solving computer science problems, from easy to hard. I cannot disclose in detail the questions that I had to solve, but they regarded algorithms, recursion and DOM traversing.
Overall, I felt very confident with my answers. The interviewer was there to solve my questions regarding the problems, but the interview was not over until I solved them.
After some rounds the hiring process had to stop. :(
It is important to know that companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook hire the best developers of the world, so they were expecting nothing less from me. My advice would be to practice. There are people who practice everyday until they can get that job.
Leet Code and Interview Cake are great starting points, Clean Code and Cracking the Code Interview are also excellent reference materials.
Good luck!