Working at Google

So yesterday I accepted the job offer from Google. I will be working with their Site Reliability Engineering team in Manhattan, NY.

I know, I know, I should've picked California.

Anyhow, I first got an e-mail from Google last September about working there. I never really wanted to leave Toronto, but the opportunity sounded intriguing. I expressed my interest and the recruiter began to explain the screening and interview process to me.

I then went through three technical phone-interviews, each about 45-minutes long. They covered everything from algorithms to networks to operating systems. I had to write programs in various languages over the phone. That's right, "for open-parenthesis x equals 1 semicolon x less-than er no greater-than er yeah... blah blah".

Ofcourse, since I'm in Canada, I had to do extra phone interviews just so that they could be sure about flying me down for the real interview (or atleast that's what they told me).

There I was at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, CA. Six back-to-back interviews scheduled. All of which were very technical, and very detailed. We discussed search algorithms, bandwidth throttling, optimization, bottleneck-finding, and wrote lots of quasi-code.

It was as brutal as it was fun. By the end of it, I was exhausted. I initially wanted to tour and take pics of the campus (no pics allowed inside); but by the end of it, I just wanted to go home.

Anyhow, a few weeks later, they told me that I got the job. Unfortunately, at the time I wasn't able to legally work in the U.S. without an H1-B. I had to wait until I got my Canadian citizenship, before I could start.

Now I'm a Citizen, got my passport; and am starting with Google on the 27th of March.

To anyone else who's interviewing at Google: don't sweat it. There's a lot of posts on the web where people talk about Google interviews being outrageously difficult, and something only Ph.D.s can get through; but that's just blown way out of proportion.

They're not easy, but if you know your stuff, and enjoy what you do, you'll do good.

So... I'm off by the end of March; I've got lots of stuff for sale; and after five years of being a Canadian resident, am once again going to be an American resident.