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.