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Google Adjusts Hiring Processes
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is attempting to fine tune its hiring process as it ramps up recruiting to keep pace with its success, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'In Google's early years, [Sergey] Brin or co-founder Larry Page interviewed nearly all job candidates before they were officially hired. A former Google executive recounts how, on occasion, Mr. Brin would show up for candidates' job interviews in unconventional dress, from roller blades to a cow costume complete with rubber udders around Halloween. Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications.' While the interview process can remain 'glacial,' Google's new head of human resources notes that the average number of in-person interviews for each candidate offered a job has declined to 5.1 from 6.2. The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly."
From TFA: "[Google] has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools"
Nice to know that the new hotness is still the same old and busted.
"You're just the person we've been Googling for."
before getting a job in the tech industry, you should consider learning Chinese and Hindi first.
:)
Either you'll be learning it to get in, or you'll be learning it to speak to your future boss.
Have a nice day.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I worked in HR for a while, and the boss there - someone I regard highly - had a saying: "Problems aren't encountered, they're recruited". By that token, the converse is also true. If you actively seek people who expect to do better things (not just want to), they probably will, and so will your company.
Word to the wise.
Meta will eat itself
The results? Zero persons hired. And we are all card-carrying, Linux-using, OpenBSD-loving, certified nerds. Heck, just check my Journal if you don't believe me (Last entry: "How to compile gcc-4.1.1 on Solaris 8").
(All the names have been changed to protect the guilty, of course)
The moral of the story: it's tough kids. It's even worse than that. It's double-extra tough, with a heaping plate of steaming geekiness on the side. Is it worth it? Hey, don't ask me, I don't know. What I know is that we all now have great jobs, that are well paid, and did not take all this insanity to get. But these jobs are not 'cool' Google jobs, of course. YMMV.
Ask me again in a couple of years, when I try to get another job at the Googleplex...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Google was successful because they had a good product and business plan.
Their hiring practices may have resulted in a good product. On the other hand, they may have just been lucky.
When you delegate hiring to these, you completely f*ck up the future of any company.
These people, without knowing any little shit about really what a particular position would require psychologically and technically from an applicant, mess up whole system by putting forth absurd and utterly stupid "psychological evaluation" crapola in front of the candidates. Check this one out :
"You have come back late from work, and suddenly phone rings, and a group of 10 of your friends announce that they are coming to your place for dinner. You check around the cupboards, and find out that there is only one sack of flour and some pepper. What do you do ?"
Stupid bitch (in this case), i pick up the phone and tell the fucking friends to buzz off, of course. Moreover you are so stupid that you are totally incapable of realizing such above shit have the pitiful possibility of happening anywhere in this worldly civilization as :
1 - when you come home from work at 23.00 at night, noone rings and says they are coming to dinner
2 - only in military, and only high level officers can gather up a 10 people strong group at 23.00 in the night instantly.
3 - People after college do not tend to still live in and get around in herds.
4 - EVEN if somehow with great glory of existence such a crapola has happened, the most spectacular thing that anyone can do with a sack of flour, some amount of peppers and tap water is adding some water to flour and pepper, and showing the resulting mixture up his incoming friends' asses.
Furthermore, stupid bitch (in this case), you are SO stupid, SO overly away from realities is that the LEAST thing you would require in a production line supervisor mechanical engineer is extravertness, talkativeness, and high social activity. You are going to put him in front of a 15 m production line that never stops, constantly takes in raw materials and purports out intermediate parts. if you put someone with social wants or aptidude to such a position, chances are high that in 1.5 years time he will show up at work with a shotgun at hand and blow off 5-10 of his colleagues, probably including your bitchy (in this case) ass.
f*ck.
Read radical news here
How is that a troll? If we have learned anything from the dot.com bubble it is that growing too quickly correlates strongly with the demise of the company (or a shitload of money from a buyout and a subsequent crash of the buying company). If you hire 1000 people a year, you have to give 3 people a day something to do. In a tech company, especially in one that favors algorithmic changes over manual intervention, that is a tough thing to do. Quick growth also dillutes the company culture because the new employees need time to internalize the ways of the company before they can pass them on to other new employees.
How is that a troll?
It's anti-Google. Other possible troll topics include suggesting that the GPL is viral, suggersting the PS3 might succeed, being positive about Microsoft, and any opinion on hot button topics such as gun control or immigration.
I applied for a Software Engineering position at Google in Sydney being an Australian Resident a while ago. While I wasn't successful (it was a long shot, so I wasn't too concerned), I was utterly amazed at how incompetent their HR department at Mountain View was.
:-)
;-)
The story is as below:
1) So I get the 'thank you for your interest we really want to talk to you blah blah' email from one of the people in HR, requesting a phone interview from the US to my mobile (note: I live in AU), so I give them my full, prefixed international mobile number: +614XXXXXXXX, and we arrange a time. I was to be interviewed by their head honcho of Open Source Chris DiBona.
So, I wait patiently for a call a few days later, the phone never rings.
Turns our they couldn't get the number right, or at least, didn't know how to call an Australian international mobile number.
They said they left messages on my phone, but I don't have voicemail on, the mobile phone isn't an answering machine, and it's on and in full coverage all the time...
I only find this out later that day when I emailed them requesting what happened...
2) So, we re-organised the interview (over email with their HR people), again with Chris DiBona.
There's a mess up again, and nobody calls. Again, I waited patiently with the phone, awaiting for the call, nothing happened.
3) So, we reschedule the interview AGAIN (this time, not with Chris, but another person high up the chain who will remain unnamed). They forget to call.
4) So, it's a week and a bit later, as due to the time difference, the turn-around on sorting out these stuffups takes about 2.5 days each time.
I re-schedule again, but I don't pause my life for it anymore (decided to go to work anyway). Guess what, he forgets to call, and the HR girl who tries to contact me, forgot to press the '+' in '+61' to call my international phone number, so she couldn't get to me.
5) It's almost two weeks later now, and we re-schedule again, with a lady. I finally get a call in the morning.
40 minutes of questions on B+ trees and Index tables, and I'm done.
6) I get an email a week after that saying 'thank you for your interest blah blah, but you don't fit the profile for' - This being for a different job to that of what I actually applied for.
So, understandably, by the end of this all, I really didn't give a shit if I didn't get the job, well, at least the job I applied for.
My skill set is great, my academic record 'alright', but to be honest, if a company can't pull its shit together like that, then I'm really not that interested in working for them, regardless of the inherit 'coolness' factor.
In any case, I'm doing better now that I envisage I would be if I were simply a Software Engineer at Google in any case, but that's how things in life pan out don't they
Crazy... I mean seriously, I just have to personally have a few beers, and perhaps 2 hrs chat to someone and I know
if they can hack it.
NOTE to google, if you have to go through 8 phone interviews, 5 personal interviews, then either your so bi-polar and anal, or so innefficient, that you
daily work practice is just as slow you never get anything done - 12 meetings to decide one icon perhaps?. Work fast, work elite, like 80s hackers did. Document later
or get a cheap secretary to dictate the docs.
2. I bet the google guys would fail lots of interviews themselves, thats why they probably started google in the first place, because they knew it was tuff out there.
3. It doesnt take much to be great, you just have to know whats crap, thats all, there are lots of ways to achieve great results, there are many paths
to the final goal, but if you dont know the traps, then your toast. Taking a long time for interviews is bad business, the other person isnt loaded with 100000s of dollars
saved up, he has to eat, and pay bills, he wont wait 6 weeks, he'll take the first decent job. If someone you see is good, grab them asap.
4. Like any artist of photographer or musician, you only have to know their past work, and bingo you know if they are good. Past results speak.
5. lots of things google does isnt WOW man stuff, it just takes hours to do.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Good to know. Thanks. Saves me the effort of wasting my time talking to some snotnosed hotshot who imagines that imagining he's real smart is the same thing as actually having done it. The upside of this is of course that with a continually increasing stock price you can entice young people to work in a place with an aura of becoming something magical in the future. The downside is that when the stock price flattens out, the idea of being interviewed in a cow costume, especially when you just graduated Stanford with a 4.0 won't seem that interesting. And coupled with the fact that your employee base has no depth it will mean retention falls through the floor.
Good job Google. Good to know that we greybeards are at least as disposable to you as your Indian help desk.
And if you are from Google please ignore this posting as I have nothing to offer someone as young and brash as you are.
Read that again.
I guess we know one person that isn't qualified for Google.
How many can expect to get hired by Google? A very tiny miniscule microscopic fraction of CS and IT graduates... that's about all. For the rest of us, this is non-news.
And again, it's not like Google's methods and philosophies can be adopted by other firms. Totally useless article, waste of time, IMO.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Maybe YOU could have called THEM the first time you didn't receive your call? Would have saved everyone a lot of grief....
I think you mean: "You're just the person we've been 'us'ing for."
I had a similar experience. I received this email from a hr person speaking on behalf of Google telling me she was interested in discussing job opportunities with me. I have my CV on a website (with a note that I'm quite happy in my current job) so that's how she found me. Normally I politely decline such offers. Anyway this was Google so I decided to hear her out. It turned out she didn't actually read my CV and also did not have anything concrete to offer (i.e. something matching my CV). What she offered was this very long, open ended process of phone interviews and maybe, just maybe, I'd get hired.
Eh, no thanks I'm not that desperate, thank you very much. Hint: if you want to recruit me consider that A) I have a nice job B) You practically need to beg me to work for you rather than the other way around.
If Google wants to get the best they need to treat people a little differently. Coming in with this arrogant attitude practically guarantees that they offend people like me long before a concrete job offer is on the table. Putting dump HR processes in front of me is pretty much guaranteed to piss me off in minutes. Don't waste my time with that!
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft had a problem: They just weren't cool enough any more. For the past decade, Microsoft's hiring strategy had worked on a very simple model: "Everybody wants to work here, so we just have to decide which people we want." When Microsoft stopped being cool, they suddenly had to work a lot harder, and in a completely different way, to attract the employees they needed. In a mature company, the hiring process works both ways; the applicant tries to convince the employer to hire them, and the employer tries to convince the applicant that they would like to have the job. Just like Microsoft ten years ago, Google is in the middle of shifting from "the cool place where everybody wants to work" to being one of many options to be judged each on their individual merits.
When I visited Google in August, I spent the entire day inside a 10'x10' room answering questions. When I asked questions of my interviewers, the response was always either "I don't know anything about that, you should ask someone else", or "I'd love to talk about that, but I've got a time limit and lots of questions I need you to answer". I don't blame my interviewers for this; they did the best they could. I blame HR for setting up the process the way they did. In the end, Google was absolutely certain that they wanted to hire me, but they hadn't done anything to convince me that I wanted the job they were offering. None of my interviewers took me to their corner of the building and showed me what it was like to work at Google; none of my interviewers talked about the interesting problems they had worked on recently; in fact, none of them told me even remotely as much about Google as I had learned in 15 minutes of looking at the Google jobs website.
Was the hiring process unusually bungled in my case? Probably -- Google HR had trouble figuring out what I do (which is a separate issue for Google to fix. Note to recruiters: If you can't understand something on someone's CV, ask someone with a technical background to explain it to you. The question "do you have a Master's degree?" should never be asked of someone who has a doctorate). But even if they had decided what job I was being considered for before starting to interview me, I doubt it would have made any difference.
If you want to hire good people, be prepared to spend at least as much time showing them why they should accept your offer as you do deciding if you want to make them an offer. "We're cool" may be enough to convince some people; but the smarter people are, the less likely they are to drink Kool-Aid.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
"The company continues to seek overqualified employees who can be promoted quickly"
Remember, boys and girls: "overqualified" is simply HR's way of saying "can be underpaid."
Today Google is arguably the number one place to work for in the US. You can put someone through 5 or 6 phone interviews today and ask three months later for a "2nd round" after having an onsite because there is little demand and endless supply. It becomes almost a badge for those who are there. Those around ask why it only took this person 9 interviews to get the job when it took you 11. Trust me on this I worked for the number one company for talent, it happens.
However, this position in the marketplace to shall pass and the bad habits of today will linger. There talking about now "standardizing" the interview process. What a novel concept. It only took this company five years to figure that one out. We did that in an afternoon in my own team at my former employer. I can't think why having 5000 engineers asking all different questions might not be a good thing.
Apparently nobody at Google has ever looked for a job before also from the TFA, taking two months to get back to someone after an "onsite" and to ask them for a "2nd round" interview. If I haven't heard from someone in two weeks after coming to there office, I am moving on at that point.
Finally, why are the co-founders still approving people to hire? Yes, I understand that the culture and the people you hire are important aspects of the firm. But were not talking about the first 100 employees anymore, were talking about employee 6,000 to 7,000. All this does is frustrate people inside the firm and job seekers.
This stupidity will cost and its going to cost Google shareholders about $1 billion. This is a small field and the number of talented people that Google is looking for are few. Someone is going to go through this process, get pissed off, and pull a YouTube, which Google will purchase. At that point, you will be able to put an actual value to how idiotic this process really is.
Disclaimer: No I have never interviewed with Google, nor do I plan to, but had many friends go through the process.
How interesting. Much of the experience other /. posters have had with Google's HR are very similar to what I was put through when I interviewed with IBM in the mid '80s. And the opening (I hesitate to use the term "opportunity") at IBM wasn't even permanent: it was a 6 month contract.
First, it took 3 attempts to connect for a phone interview, and there was a significant degree of consternation at IBM that I would not permit such a call during the day (while I was working at a client's office). Then followed in person interviews at their Canadian head office, during which it became obvious in a hurry that they had not read my resume or confused it with another (my degree is NOT in Engineering from U of T, and I have NEVER worked as a mainframe systems programmer). Five different people, 4 hours. The only part that was really interesting was the lunch in the IBM cafeteria, where I quickly grew to understand where the "Big" in "Big Blue" came from.
Another phone interview followed, and then, despite two follow up letters from me, I heard nothing, so I just assumed that they were not interested and did not have the courtesy to contact me to tell me so. Fine. I took another contract I was interviewing for, and forgot about them.
Four months later, I got a phone call from IBM asking me when I can start. Huh? You think I'm going to wait around for 4 months while you decide? What planet did you say you were from?
What I took away from that experience was this: when HR and the company hiring process gets seriously confused and out of control, the company suffers big time. IBM had to take a major kick in the pants before they smartened up. Until they did, they were heading for irrelevance very quickly. I'm guessing that Google might have to go through the same thing. Not for a while, because they have a strong core and strong growth. But sooner or later it will happen. Every week that passes by, they take one more step away from upstart towards mature. And in IT, mature = complacent = stagnant = doomed.
How about a piece about people who turned Google down? Google were desperate to hire the writer of SquashFS onto their team of geeks, offering him all sorts of incentives to scrabble aboard (this was pre-IPO too). He turned them down because he didn't feel he would be free enough to continue development of SquashFS.
Kudos to the geek who puts OSS before a cushy job at Google and untold wealth in stock options.
I have never yet got a job when any member of HR has been in on the interview a fact which I ascribe to my obvious burning hatred of them and their pointless questions.
In a recent interview whilst the actual hirer and I were discussing their database set up the HR muppet interjected
"What does 'diversity' mean to you ?"
"Er, how do you mean" I asked, "In what context ?"
"D . . I . . V . . E . . R . . S . . I . . T . . Y ? What does it mean, to . . . . . . YOU ?"
"Well it means a wide range of, er, things - different things. A diverse selection of, whatever"
"Yes..."
"Yes ?"
"Diversity, whatdoesitmean, to YOU ?"
"I often make use of a diverse range of techniques in order evalutate them all and select the most appropriate technique for the task I was focusing on."
"Yes but in an office context, come on - in the office ?"
"Offices with a diverse range of facilities are often quite nice, I've worked in a few and enjoyed it..."
( frowning HR Muppet ) "...but how about co-workers in an office environment ?"
"I think it's a good idea to have a wide range of diverse talents and abilities within a particular team in order to maximise the chances of fitting a specific skillset with a particular challenge. In addition an aggressive policy of experience pooling can enable team members to improve their own knowledge in return for sharing their specialist knowledge with the group at large."
"Yeeeessssss, but what other kinds of diversity do you think are important in an office environment ?"
"I don't know. What other kinds ?"
I didn't get that job.
"
My old company, a DoD contractor, regularly hires kids straight out of school using the carrot-and-stick payscale: they give you a job and lots of promotions, so you always feel like you are moving forward even though you are consistently 10K underpaid. After about 5 years they taper off your yearly pay increase and you plateau, again, 10K under the competition. So you either move on or accept the fact that you make pretty good money (compared to your bartending friends) at a fairly cushy job in a really good environment.
So how does this relate to you? I think you are over qualified and expensive and Google is looking for young engineers who aren't old dogs with their own bag of tricks. While that might not be smart from your point of view, it seems to be their hiring model, as it is with many companies. You're best off forging your own path, creating your own companies, and recruiting those Google guys when they become old and tired themselves.
Now I am a contractor making 6 figures and will quickly recoup that $60K I lost working at an underpaying company, which, by the way, greatly built my resume.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Phone your friends and arrange for them to come around in order of size starting with the largest first.
Slaughter the first 3 as they step through the door and fry them up with peppers to provide a magnificent feast for the others. After you've eaten they can help you clean up the apartment and learn a salutory lesson about what happens to people who demand they come around to your house and eat your food without being invited.
I've worked in telecommunications for over twenty years, and I have yet to see a phone in North America with a "+" button on it. With all due respect, WTF are you talking about?
What was once true, is no longer so
I would berate my parents for their being no food in the fridge and send them out to get a chinese or something.
OR
Of course there is no food in the fridge. There is no food in the fridge because I have guessed all my friends would once again be arriving unannounced ( the jokers ) and have already taken all the food out of the fridge and cooked a delicious 3 course meal for 10. So Mr Interviewer, hah what do you say to that then eh !
OR
My friends are all supermodels, when they say "Coming around to eat" what they actually mean is they're coming around to do cocaine and I always have plenty of that.
Gents, Just got done interviewing with Google this summer. After the 4 telephone interviews I have had with them, I can say this... Everyone I have spoken to, was extremely knowledgeable, polite, and seemed like a enthusiastic human being... My degree is not from a top private school... Heck, I was working as a sr. linux admin at an ISP while getting through my schooling... if someone has done 60 hrs/wk work + full time university student, would know the commitment that takes. The technical interviews went fabulous, I seemed to be on course, and certainly answered most questions correctly... Throughout the interviews, I kept stressing the fact that I am very capable of learning new tasks in a short amount of time, and given my record, I have proven myself as a worthy individual... Well, the sob story ends with this... The first HR guy calls me back and says... blablabla, not the right person... Great. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, there was little hope in my mind to get hired at google. I have sent several emails back saying... "Thank you for your time... blabalbla... Would you mind sharing with me why you decided not to continue the interview process with me? What areas do I need to study up in? How should I better myself, in order to become eligible for employment at your company?" Pretty sure those are valid questions, but havent heard back ... ever...
I think those questions seemed pretty valid...
Recently I was interviewing for a SRE position at Google and everything was going allright, until an interviewer asked me how to implement a singleton in Java. Then I explained the standard pattern using a static initializer and told him the so-called "double check" pattern a lot of developers use doesn't work in Java (this is well documented here). Since the interviewer didn't have a clue about that problem, he spent some 15 minutes fighting my point, and in the end of the interview he even said the correct way of implementing it is to use a double check, although I have explained him 10 times the Java memory model makes that construct break. I even told him to search for "java singleton problem" in Google to understand what I told him, but maybe this was a bad idea, he seemed to be already in a bad mood in the beggining of the interview, this made him even more poignant. Guess what? They sent me the "raw dismiss letter" after that interview...
Then here goes my advice for you if you're going to apply for google: pray for luck! If you get a *single* dumb interviewer in your way, you'll be out. It's not a fair process, they don't care about giving feedback for you promptly (expect at least 1 week to have feedback after any iteration with them), and sometimes the interviewers don't know exactly what they are talking about. Be warned.
I've had a similar experience to what many posted here. I had a phone interview with a fairly qualified technical manager who wanted me to debug Javascript over the phone from a website she had given me. Ok, no problem. Then she starts asking me about technologies and languages that 1) aren't on my resume at all, and 2) have nothing to do with the job I'm applying for. After stating these facts many times, she came back with "oh we're looking to hire you for a different job, not that one." Uh....considering I had none of the qualifications of what she was actually talking to me about and all of the qualifications of the job which I had initially applied for, I cut the conversation short. Then a few months later my husband got an email from a Google recruiter (we were able to verify the email address, name, and the fact that it really was sent from a Google Recruiter) that basically said: "John, we're hiring. You interested?" The response he sent back was: "Dave, no".
There is irony in Google's admission that it needs the very type
of personnel for whom they have been alleged to treat shabbily,
such as Brian Reid, whose age discrimination case is on appeal:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5283653.html
As part of the suggested settlement for the Reid v. Google suit,
Google was admonished to bring about a drastic overhaul
of hiring practices biased toward creating disparate impact.
Reid's eye-opening comments are in the public Santa Clara
County case documents, as well as in John Battelle's "The Search".
(At Amazon, one would do well to "search inside the book"
[using A9 technology, not Google's!] to land on pages
223 and 233 or thereabouts.)
Brin = University of Maryland graduate
Page = University of Michigan graduate
These fools working at Google need to learn a thing or two about probability. The Intelligence distribution relative to the mean (measured by I.Q.) at Ivy League schools is nearly identical to that of state schools. Key phrase: relative to the mean. The only difference between the population in an Ivy and the population of (insert state school) is that the ivy's population has a higher average intelligence. What does this mean? There is a huge population of very bright individuals within the state university population that are just as smart or smarter than the average ivy leaguer. Brin and Page are an obvious example of this!
Why do Brin and Page play it up as if they're hot-shot Stanford grads? Do they not remember their roots in STATE UNIVERSITY? I've interviewed there myself and let me tell you: there is a subset of people working at Google that graduated from top schools and think they're the smartest and that nobody from a lesser school is worthy of working with them. If you interview with one of these people be very careful and be on your best.
The real question is, if I went to Wharton, Kellog, HU, SU, Yale, etc....why would I want to work at Google? If I went to MIT I would want to compete against Google. They should focus on getting the best employee they can, while they can, regardless of education. Google is at it's peak right now. The employees should enjoy it. Eventually, they are going to enter the Consumer Support game and they will also have to start selling into Corporations and then Small/medium sized businesses. When that happens they are going to be hiring from ITT and every other vocational school there is. Companies like MSFT, IBM, ACN, HP et al are getting the large numbers of "above the mean" kids. They might not be getting the top 1% but they don't need to. History repeats itself and Google will make the same mistake of arrogance these other companies have made.
3 things are certain in life: death, taxes, and me not getting hired at Google.
I was pretty surprised at the abruptness of the dismissal, but if there would have been another 10 interviews before reaching "2nd round," as some say, then I'm glad I dropped out at the fourth interview. It's a bit of a shame, I think my skill set, background, and technical approach would have been very well suited to google, and helped them.
But the opportunities in this industry are endless, so life goes on :)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So how would a person in his/her (very early) 20's with 5 years of desktop support/IT experience even be able to get into google?
Every job I've ever seen them post has been for a guru. Who manages their hiring process for low-level tech support?
I interviewed at Google, and the first person (kid) to interview me had the juevos to ask me "you know you're kinda of old to work here. You really want to work for kids?". I thought long and hard about filing suit... but my alzheimers caused me to forget about it...
Yep, I know which one this was. I apologize for the mixup. I did route you to someone else after that because I was heading out of town and honestly I thought I wasn't the right person to interview you.
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
I laughed pretty hard at the parent, but then I started thinking: why is this so funny? I realized that for me anyway, it's the first line.
Clearly on Slashdot, it's not enough to slaughter and prepare 3 of your friends to feed the rest. No, first you have to run a sort.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
On the other hand, I do have 10 years professional experience as a programmer in the USA at such high-profile companies as Computer Associates, Netscape Communications, America-Online, and Sun Microsystems, where I have been extremely successful, always one of the top-rated employees everywhere. I have actually been programming for 18 years, and turned 30 last june. I don't actually feel young anymore, but I would think I would still fit well with the corporate culture of Google. I bought a house in Silicon Valley at 21, I have been making 6 figures since 2000, and my career continued to flourish even during the dot-com bust.
However, my lack of degree made me a complete non-starter at Google. They wouldn't even schedule me for an interview. At least they didn't waste much of my time !
But the emails and calls from Google recruiters keep coming. This very morning, I got an email from another one about a possible 3 months temporary position as a software QA. I really went off on them about how mismatched that was for me, and told them to delete my resume from their database, since I just accepted a new job, at conditions sufficiently advantageous to guarantee a comfortable early retirement.
Google's stupidity in hiring practices was their loss, IMNSHO.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog