Eye In The Sky

For those interested in Vegas related content, you may as well skip this story. If you’re a Googler - a Goog tool using dweeb (like me) - you might find this amusing.

Last April, my day job company sent me to “The Ajax Experience” a 3 day conference in San Francisco for programmer geeks to talk about a fancy new (actually old) javascript technique that is all the rage these days. Programmer conferences are usually three-day sausage parties filled with articulate digressions on the minutiae of syntactical hogwash and heaping doses of open source hullaballoo, Microsoft bashing, W3C standards complying and incredibly high levels of all-around dorkitechture. I ate meals with the programmers who work for Netflix, Yahoo!, Microsoft and more. While I was there I entered my name into a contest by Google to win an iPod. I had just bought a new iPod but I figured what the fudge - I can give it to Miss Monkay as her’s recently hit the skids. Truth be told, the reason I entered the contest is: I needed an excuse to steal some Google schwag from their recruiting table - pens, notepads, post-its, trippy pins with flashing lights on em… ya know schwag… the same stuff I steal from Vegas hotel rooms. The conference on the whole was great, I learned a lot of stuff (some of which you will be seeing on VegasTripping shortly).

About two weeks afterward an email arrived in my day job inbox with the subject “Hello From Google” from a person named Nina. Hmmm. Is this spam? I do have a friend who works for Google, but this isn’t him. Maybe they want to ask me questions about my usage of Google products… who knows. I trust Google so I opened it up. The email read:

Hello Charles, 
How are you?
 
I am an onsite recruiter at Google focused on hiring software engineers and individual contributors It was very nice meeting you at the AJAX conference in San Francisco. I wanted to drop you a note to see if you would reconsider an opportunity with Google? If you are open to that type of conversation, please feel free to circle back with me. If you know anyone else who would be please do forward my contact information.

Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you soon

Thanks
Nina
Technical Sourcer

The lack of punctuation must mean that A) this isn’t a form letter or B) this is a form letter with lousy punctuation to make you think this isn’t a form letter - I haven’t decided yet. Anyways, my initial reaction was… hey, why wouldn’t I be interested in working at the big G. I use a huge amount of their products, study their business model, and really dig their software on the web strategy (Writely, Calendar, Spreadsheet etc…). I shot her an email back saying so, she replied saying “send me your resume,” I replied to her reply then spruced up my portfolio a little and sent her my resume. Within a matter of 36 hours they set up a standard phone screen with a recruiter. I’m getting the impression they REALLY want me. Headhunted out of the blue… agressive recruiting, the whole schmear.

At the day job, I’m somewhat of a “manager type” - I go through resumes all the time. This gives me the opportunity to interview prospective candidates very often - the contact/phone screen/phone interview/in-person interview process is as familar to me as going to get a cup of coffee. I’ve interviewed 5 people in the last 2 weeks. I know all the typical interview questions and techniques to weed out good candidates - using scenarios and questions to get interviewees to demonstrate their personalities and possibly tell you some things that probably don’t want you to know. Interviewing is akin to the way professional poker players probe their opponents in the hopes they’ll give up a “tell” as to whether or not they are bluffing. These experiences have given me the tools to see through loaded interviewer questions when I’m the candidate in question. I don’t snow job interviews, I don’t have to. But I can detect when interviewers are trying to get me to fold or go “all in” with rags when they’ve got aces back to back.

The day of the phone interview, I ducked out off the office and took the call on my cell. Nina passed me over to Sarah, the “recruiter”… she told me straight away they had 7 positions and she loved my portfolio and so did the team’s manager. We talked for a bit and we hit it off great… she’s a Vegas tripper, loves Rehab at the Hard Rock, got hitched at the Trop - great lady. She told me the job was on the “Webmaster Team” and as soon as she “got me in there” we would make quick work of poaching the people who I manage as well. Interesting… I’m feeling that this might already be a done deal. The hitch is I’d have to move up to Northern California (from Los Angeles). Sure, I’ll consider taking a crack at San Fran… I love it up there even though driving to Vegas from San Fran is hellaciously impossible. In closing, Sarah mentioned that she would send me a “test” to see how well I would transform, fix, debug and Googlize a sample html project.

A day or so later, the HTML test arrived - a completely muffed up “tour” of Google’s products and services - it’s copious amounts of bodacious html and content errors was absolutely hysterical. It was a little bit of a mind bender, but nothing as scary as designing strict xhtml, dom traversable css template structure for one of the largest and most used ecommerce websites in the world (my day job). I dutifully put the paragraphs in the correct order, removed the useless javascript window.open calls, removed incorrect screenshots, defragged the rancid font and nested table tags, and so on and so on and so on. All in all a very thorough proofreading test that, despite its mundanity, was chock full of amusing challenges. While researching Google’s HTML style guide, I was truly shocked to see that their HTML code standards is trapped in 1999. I felt transported to the glory days of the dot com boom of 1998/1999 - writing out endless strings of font tags, nested tables, spacer images - the whole pre-CSS shebang. I had almost forgotten the toil of my HTML greasemonkey days - before tables vanished and CSS became the monster that it is. I completed the test and sent it back in. Sarah replied nearly instantly, saying I missed a spelling error. Clever Google chose a misspelling that isn’t in Microsoft Word’s spell checker. I’m enjoying this little game of exterminator vs. the roaches. I sent it back in a flash. Sarah told me that the Google team would re-convene the following week to review my work - she would contact me afterwards.

A week went by and Sarah sent me another email - the team liked my design and would like to move forward with a phone interview with one of the team members Athena. At a pre-determined date and time, I ducked out of the office to take the phone call from Athena, a member of the Webmaster team. We chatted for about an hour. She asked me why I wanted to work for Google. “Why wouldn’t I want to work for Google… I use tons and tons of the products daily, I believe in the company and particulary the ‘don’t be evil’ credo.” I continued by telling her that even if I don’t get the job, I am proud to be considered for the job, because Google only hires the best and brightest in their respective fields. We talked about a myriad of other subjects, how to deal with distressed timelines, how to manage assets and projects, how I deal with communication breakdowns, and how I would feel about not being a “manager” at Google and being back in the trenches fighting the war with HTML. We hit it off really really well and shared a ton of giggles and good vibes. Athena was very very friendly, asked great questions and truly listened to my responses. We said our goodbyes and I headed back into the office. I aced round 2.

The next day (Wednesday) Sarah sent me another email saying that I did fantastic on the phone interview and that they wanted to skip the second technical phone interview and fly me up to Mountain View to meet the team. Fantastic! I skipped a round of interviews… is this a done deal? The hitch: they wanted to do this NOW, the team lead was going on vacation and they wanted to get me in there ASAP. We traded a bunch of late night emails until it was set up - they would fly me from Burbank to San Jose the following Monday to meet the team, and fly me home the same day.

That weekend I filled out all the paperwork - job, salary and educational history - the usual stuff. Despite the electricity being blown out by my plumber-attempting-to-be-an-electrician landlord, I managed to: iron my lucky shirt, print out the documents, take an ice cold shower and get ready to roll.

Miss Monkay dropped me off at Burbank Airport very early in the morning and I hopped the hour long flight to San Jose (Google paid for the tickets.) Upon arrival I hopped in a cab and said to the driver “Google.” I felt really proud as the taxi made it’s way to the Googleplex. I thought of how proud my Mom would be if she were still alive… I heard her voice say “Charlie, I told you that you can do anything you want as long as you apply yourself - and now you’ve finally done it… if only you weren’t such a slob.”

I smiled out the cab window as we whisked by Yahoo! headquarters (another .com company whose products I use and enjoy). I daydreamed about accidentally bumping into Steve Jobs at a Starbucks in Cupertino - hell… this is Silicon Freakin Valley anything can happen! The prospect of working for Google is akin to getting signed to a multi bajillion dollar contract by the Yankees. Prime time, big time, the big game, the show, final table at the World Series of Poker. As the daydreams faded away, the cab exited the freeway, past the computer history museum, a coupla food joints and onto the Googleplex Campus. I hopped out of the taxi, paid the $38 fare (yikes!) and settled down on a park bench next to a “water feature” that looks like a leaky toilet compared to the fountains at Bellagio - it was still nice and zen, but certainly not stunning - much in the same way Google’s User Interface works. Google isn’t Vegas. I sat on the park bench and chowed on my breakfast - a Clif Bar - and sent some instant messages to Miss Monkay via my blackberry letting her know I arrived safely and on time. When the time came (I was an hour early) I signed off the blackberry, straightened my shirt, double checked my paperworrk, took a deep breath and entered the Googleplex…

(Stay tuned for Part 2: Inside the Googleplex)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 2:18 am and is filed under Interweb, Oog Boogler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.