At Linux.conf.au, which I’ve efficiently failed to finish writing about, Google had a beer bash. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I went because – well, free drink! However, at one point I was sitting talking to some people, and one of the recruiters came by with a list for me to put our email addresses down on, so I did. Can’t hurt, right? A couple of weeks later I get an email asking if I was interested in working for them. So I said sure. So I had a pre-interview about a week after that, and then yesterday had the first phone interview. It was fairly chatty, which was nice. It was just one person, who was a programmer, so it wasn’t an HR person reading from a script or anything like that. Asked a bunch of questions about computer science stuff: stacks, sorting, etc. A note to anyone doing something similar: the stuff taught in second year computer science (at Otago, anyway) is invaluable, it turns out. That and a few thoughts about how to apply them.
I’m applying for the SRE (Systems Reliability Engineering (I think)) group, which is the one that manages the servers for search and ads. They do things like failure management, resource planning (like “we’re going to need a new datacentre in a few months”), software deployment, monitoring, and so forth. The impression I get is that it’d be a nice mix of systems and software stuff.
So anyway, if they liked me from this interview (I won’t find out for a week or so), I get another one or two phone interviews, and if I’m still in the running, I think they’d then fly me over there for something in person. That would be pretty cool.