I come from a country where resume decides most things and interviews are mere sanity checks, so at the time (2005), I didn't know what to expect of my day-long

I come from a country where resume decides most things and interviews are mere sanity checks, so at the time (2005), I didn't know what to expect of my day-long Google interview. At the end of the day though, I emailed home: "Even if I didn't get the job, that was AWESOME" - if you can accept the potential ego-bruise, interviewing that way can be pretty fun. It's like mountain biking, but with whiteboards. Not that there aren't better interview systems, but I'm not sure how well many of them scale.