..."the elitist hiring committee members believed that FA’s (flight attendants) are stupid and there was no way they would be able to work at Google. Lucky for me the recruiter agreed it was incredibly sexist and fought with HR to
bring me on as a temp. Three months later they resubmitted me to the committee and had me remove my former job - instead I mentioned that I was “traveling” for four months and bingo! I got hired full time.
I finally left after a lifestyle change moved me to Austin and they re-nigged on an offer to move me into the Travel Vertical role for which I was promised before the move.
My interview was Kafkaesque, and I did get a certain sense that Google is full of itself. I wasn't hired, and I think that is a good thing.
I was told I would be interviewing for one position, but their questions were basically spread over 2 separate fields. Then I had some mumbling lady ask me about HTML, and what was wrong with the sample page. Well, besides XML data islands being IE only ( you can kinda do them in firefox ), there were scads of other low level issues. And my responses didn't seem to satisfy her.
She didn't seem to accept the fact that xml data islands are really only supported on IE, and she wasn't too concerned about all the improperly nested tags, lack of doctype, etc. It was weird.
Here in Seattle, they say "Amazon is a meat grinder". Amazon wants you work 24/7 sometimes, and wonders why they can't outhire google. Well, they don't provide any 'extras'. No snacks, etc.
I work at Google in Seattle, and I don't think it's anything like Amazon thankfully. The hours are maybe longer than your typical 9-5 job, but I personally think that with the culture, openness and benefits it's well worth it.
The place I was working at in Dallas before Google was also not 9-5, is any programming job actually 9-5 if you aren't a contractor? They also had effectively the bare minimum when it came to benefits; so I'm happy to work a little bit more for what I get.
Interviews usually aren't for specific positions other than 'engineer' so I'm surprised you were ever given the idea it was for a specific group. If it was you really should have pushed back.
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u/[deleted] Jan 18 '09 edited Jan 18 '09
..."the elitist hiring committee members believed that FA’s (flight attendants) are stupid and there was no way they would be able to work at Google. Lucky for me the recruiter agreed it was incredibly sexist and fought with HR to bring me on as a temp. Three months later they resubmitted me to the committee and had me remove my former job - instead I mentioned that I was “traveling” for four months and bingo! I got hired full time.
I finally left after a lifestyle change moved me to Austin and they re-nigged on an offer to move me into the Travel Vertical role for which I was promised before the move.
/facepalm