I was contacted by a Google recruiter via LinkedIn to see if I was interested in exploring an opportunity with the Site Reliability Engineering team. Even though I'm very happy in my current position, who turns up their first chance to interview with Google? I was contacted on a Thursday and had an initial recruiter phone screen set up for the following Monday. The recruiter started by asking me to talk about my background and experience, then explained the position to me. After rating myself on a number of different topics (networking, UNIX internals, UNIX administration, Python, Java, C++, C, Shell scripting, etc.), I was asked six fairly basic questions. I got all of them correct (none were very difficult), and the recruiter told me that someone would reach out to me in the next few days to schedule a technical phone interview in a couple weeks. She also let me know that she'd be providing me with some documents that discussed what kind of information I should brush up on to prepare myself. A couple days later, I received an email with a time for the phone interview as well as the link to a Google Doc they'd use for scripting questions to simulate a whiteboard. The interview was scheduled for about a week and a half later, so I had time to review the interview prep docs. The docs themselves were definitely helpful. After reviewing them, I was able to identify places that I needed some refreshers and concentrated there. When the interview itself came, the call came on time. The interviewer was friendly and easy to talk to. He introduced himself and asked if I had any questions (I told him I'd wait until the end in case any were answered during the interview, though I was never given a chance to ask again -- probably due to time constraints), and then we dove right in to the technical questions. I was asked a series of increasingly complex networking questions that started out *very* basic (How does a switch work?) and became more complex as he got a feel for my skill levels. After a while, we moved on to Linux/UNIX internals (processes, signals, etc.). The second half of the interview was a scripting exercise in the shared Google Doc. Without giving too much away, I was asked to write a script that would parse data from a passwd file and return some information. Though I expected this, I found scripting in a word processor significantly more difficult than I had anticipated. It took me much longer than I'd hoped, and after the interview I kept thinking of little problems I hadn't caught. By the end of the scripting exercise, the interviewer seemed pretty disinterested and abruptly ended the call with a promise that the recruiter would follow up after he'd submitted his feedback. A great credit to Google, I received a call about a week later from my recruiter who let me know that they decided to pass. She also mentioned that the feedback from the interviewer was that I was very strong in networking and UNIX questions, but that they felt that I didn't have enough scripting experience. She invited me to apply again down the road and told me that she'd keep me in mind in the future for similar positions. All in all, though I'm disappointed, it was definitely refreshing to be provided actual feedback on the results of my interview as well as a phone call rather than a canned email or complete silence.