I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Aug 2013
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn, which was a pleasant surprise. After a short phone screen with some questions relating to my background and covering a breadth of technology to gauge my knowledge and experience, I was scheduled for several more rounds of interviews.
I was next interviewed by an SRE. The interview covered a couple general programming type questions, no big surprises here.
After this, I was flown out to Mountain View, CA in order to do on-site interviews. I had 4 technical interviews with various engineers, covered a wide variety of programming problems and concepts (from data structures to map-reduce), and even had lunch with an engineer, where I was able to get a lot more of my informal questions answered.
Overall it was an extremely positive experience. The majority of the engineers (with one minor exception) were very pleasant to talk with. The recruiters were all quick to respond and communicative. Even though I feel like there is an element of randomness to the interviews (will you get the questions close to your expertise? Will you prepare for the right questions?), it was overall a great experience, and I wouldn't be afraid of applying in the future if I wanted my career to go in that direction.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in Apr 2013
Interview
An initial phone screen with recruiter followed by two technical interviews, one involved coding in a shared document. Recruiter came back each time and said I did very well, then invited me on-site for an all day interview. The on-site just consisted of the same types of questions from the phone interviews in 1-1 form with a series of 5 people. Nobody seemed to care much about getting to know me or learning about my skills I have to offer -- just doing random homework exercises.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2013
Interview
A basic recruiting call to find out about my abilities and experience. Also took the time to explain that they were recruiting for the SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) team. Asked some screening questions and to rate myself on a list of technologies. By the end of the interview, both the recruiter and myself knew I wasn't a direct fit for the job but they did send my resume to other entities within Google.