Not comfortable sharing specific numbers, but check out Glassdoor for a range. The key to Google offers is realizing the value of target bonuses and restricted

Not comfortable sharing specific numbers, but check out Glassdoor for a range. The key to Google offers is realizing the value of target bonuses and restricted stock units. Typically a startup will offer you Common Incentive Stock Options. When they vest, you have to buy the shares out of pocket and pay capital gains on the difference in valuation, even though you have no means of selling them unless the company exits. The company can also exit via a sale, in which case if the sale is too low common stockholders get screwed (and they might do it intentionally to screw over ex-employees and grant retention bonuses to current employees instead). The reason for this is because "investors are putting up money" and therefore deserve preferred stock, even though they are asking you to take a significant salary cut for those common stock and that salary cut represents a far bigger portion of your income than the investment represents the VC's portfolio. Look up Liquidation Preference for more information on this. Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting (or hold onto one of the hottest stocks of the last decade). No need to pay any money out of pocket and risk getting burned, you can only make money. As far as the Google interview, there is a massive amount of information about it which the Google recruiter will provide, but check out Glassdoor interview questions, Cracking the Coding Interview, and Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" post. Linked-lists/trees are absolutely fundamental data structures so of course you should know them. Every single engineering interview at Google _requires_ a coding question, so yes there was whiteboard coding in every interview. I would highly recommend buying a whiteboard and practicing at home because things like space management and hand-writing matter. A lot of the industry has copied the Google interview one way or the other so you might as well study for it even if you don't get the job.