Interviewing at Google bucked Wes Bos' pre-conceived notions of what an ideal candidate is.

The web developer thought Google wanted someone with a degree in computer science and only hires guys who can program in many languages.

But to his surprise, Google showed interest in him. On his blog, Bos wrote about what it was like to go through the job interview process at Google. Bos described the entire process, from emailing the HR person to being quizzed by engineers.

Here's what he had to do -- and what went wrong.

Before the interview, the recruiter told him to brush up on the basics. "The HR rep sent over an email with some guidelines and things to brush up on which included comp sci 101 things such as sorting algos, hash tables, binary trees and so on. I was familiar with a few things on the list, but I definitely had to do a lot of reading in the week and a half before my interview."

Demonstrate how you'd solve real world problems. Here, a mobile developer asked him which algorithms would work in specific situations. "I tripped over quite a few of these and felt pretty embarrassed."

Be ready to code on a whiteboard. This is tricky if you're used to programming entirely on a computer. "I had never coded on a whiteboard before and I felt like I made a few stupid mistakes. Next up was another mobile developer from another product that they work on in the Google Waterloo office. We started off talking JavaScript performance again and then jumped right into the coding problem on the whiteboard. I was pretty nervous at this point in time and I made a few more silly mistakes that I wouldn’t have done in a proper IDE." (An IDE, or integrated development environment, is a type of software used by developers to write code.)

He didn't get the job, but was happy he went through tne process anyway. Most important, it taught him that learning multiple languages would make him a better developer, and that Google will take a look at young coders.

"Always be hustlin.’ A few years ago I would have never of thought I would be interviewing at Google just 9 months fresh out of school. Anything can happen," he wrote.