A cold call from Google recruiting

[btiffin]

Hello all,

I had a fairly exciting couple of weeks. Two Thursday's ago I got an email "Hello from Google". It was a recruiting note asking me if I'd be interested in a career at Google.

Unsolicited emails are always suspicious, so after a look at the email headers and finding no trace of spoofing and a little googling of the senders name, it looked legit. It was a form letter, with a few choice words changed that reflected my particular postings to the net (open source documentation contributions in GNU/Linux).

I had a screening call with the recruiter and he offered up three choices of broad area. Programming, system admin, networking. I chose systems. That led to a set of three fairly simple, but domain appropriate questions.

How to set a process priority? How many bits in standard Unix access control are used for owner permissions? Then he listed ten fields and I had to tell him which ones didn't belong in a standard /etc/passwd file.

Having passed that hurdle, a phone interview with a Google engineer was setup for last Monday. That call lasted about 45 minutes and followed the same line as the screening call but called on a much deeper understanding of the Unix, GNU/Linux environment. I "passed", but not in any stellar fashion. Questions touched on troubleshooting, find IO bottlenecks, using bash for writing a webserver, signals and process activation etc. So, some paperwork was sent off to the hiring committee. Next step would have been an on-site interview. Sadly, I got a kindly worded thank you, but we have no openings that match your skill set email today.

It's all ok with me. It was exciting and made for some great stories and fantasizing about the free gourmet lunch that Google employees are offered every day.

I was discovered (in part, I'm sure there is more to it) from my rebol.org member page. I volunteer as a librarian on that site. The vast majority of my technical help postings occur here where I try and pass on some "old guy" wisdom to all you young up and comers and on opencobol.org where I'm the keeper of the FAQ (now a 475 page book) and open source COBOL advocate. On the OpenCOBOL front I try and glue as many other subsystems as I can. The FAQ includes sections on embedding and linking to javascript, Guile, Lua, ROOT/CINT, gnuplot, Falcon, Forth, and on and on with just about anything I can get my head around. The documentation started out as ReStructuredText and is now full on LaTeX. I figure the ocfaq will weigh in at 600 pages or so when I get to a point to put a 1.0 stamp on it.

If you ever want to be "discovered", keep your on-line presence clean and if you can find something that is of interest, contribute. It's not only Google recruiting that knows how to use Google, web spiders and data mining.

Contributing is easy. Write some docs or some how to guides. If you have the skills, write some code. In my opinion, open source can use a lot more document writers. It may take a while to be accepted by established communities, but when you stick it out, you'll soon find yourself in the mix and adding to the collective conscience. Be a fan and if you find something you like, don't be afraid to go "wheeee, this is fun" on the internet as you advocate for it. No fear, wheeeeeee.

The Google opportunity was a great experience and pretty uplifting to be asked to participate. I'll carry the glow for some time to come.

Cheers

[apython1992]

That must have been an exciting week (or two)! Out of curiosity, what made you choose systems over programming?

[btiffin]

Age. I started coding at 12 on a TRS/80 (in Z-80 assembler as I found the BASIC something for clueless weenies).

What's the WWW? I want my acoustically coupled 60 baud modem on DATAPAC back. Add Tymnet and CompuServe was the place to be. Ahh, them good old days when you could type faster than comm speeds.

Cheers
P.S. Excuse the necroposting... 60 baud wreaks havoc on response time.