First step was a phone with a recruiter, basically chatting about my CV and some easy technical questions as a screening. Second step was a phone interview with an engineer, some knowledge based questions (general programmig, unix system programmin) and a small programming task (implementing a call of the C library). Third step was also a phone interview with an engineer along the same lines as the second, of similar difficulty, with a small programming task, fairly easily and the interviewer guided me as well when I could not come up easily with the solution. Then, I was invited over to London for an on-site interview. I had 5 interview in differrent domains : system administration, networking, algorithms, problem solving, large scale design. All of them where very demanding. My advice would be: - sysadmin: you need real world experience, very good knowledge of GNU CLI tools, etc - networking: very good knowledge of TCP/IP (up to the bits of the protocol, workflows etc), experience in network design - algotihms: you need to solve *literally hundreds* of problems an be able to reason about them with common and not so common algorithms (*including* NP graph algorithms). I had't and I struggled. - problem solving: books won't help much, you need real world experience - large scale design: you have not seen problems at google scale, best option is to read some google papers, like GFS, big data etc. I was not given an offer since I did not meet the expectations and they could not give me any specific details on my performance on individual sessions. It was impressive that the entire process, up to the last stage I reached, did not involved *at all* typical HR stuff like behavioural questions etc.

I applied online on June 9, 2014. After two weeks I received an email from a recruiter asking me to evaluate myself from 0 to 10 (0 being "no experience" and 10 being "super expert") on the following list: __TCP/IP Networking (OSI stack, DNS etc) __Unix/Linux internals __Unix/Linux Systems administration __Algorithms and Data Structures __C __C++ __Python __Java __Perl __Shell Scripting (sh, Bash, ksh, csh) __SQL and/or Database Admin __Scripting language of your choice (not already mentioned) _____ __People Management __Project Management I was really honest and evaluated myself a little low on almost all of them, except from Java, C++ and algorithms + data structures (which I thought were my strongest). However, the recruiter decided to schedule a phone interview with me. We agreed to have the interview on July 8, but something came up and I had to change it; she was really cool about it, and finally we scheduled for July 12. Some of the questions were: - What is the time complexity of Quicksort in the worst case scenario and in the average case? - What is the unix system call that returns file attributes about an inode? - Have you heard about linux 'tail' command? - Without using a calculator, tell me how much is 2 to the power of 24? The only one I got right was the first one =( because I read someone else's questions here, but I wouldn't remember otherwise. To be honest, if I needed to know any of that I would just Google it, but I don't remember it from 5 years ago when I studied them in the university. Also, it was a bit confusing because it was obvious that the recruiter was not a native english speaker, and neither am I, so sometimes I just didn't understand what she was saying, even after repeating 2 or 3 times. For example, on the 'tail' question I understood 'till' and of course I said I had never heard of it -.- In my humble opinion, it seemed more like an end of semester test rather than an interview. Besides, she didn't even ask me anything on the topics I evaluated myself the highest. At the end, she obviously concluded and kindly said that this was not the job for me.