Google and Scientology

Posted in: Google, Travel

I think I'll nominate my Google interview for a 24h adventure status. It's got the ingredients: travel, pressure (waking up <10am, come on!), and something a little random...

The interviews went from 11:15 to 16:00, and there was no lunch break. That's right, no Google Lunch. Renowned throughout the Bay as the premier place to snag a free gourmet platter, it appears this junket doesn't apply to candidates being hammeredinterviewed in Dublin. Oh well, it was a nice chicken sandwich anyway.

There were five interviews, mostly back to back. Identical formats, 'simple' questions ("how do you unmount a hung NFS partition without a reboot") followed by longer on-the-whiteboard questions. 5 x 50mins or so. The five were prefaced by a disclaimer that "even if you think you do badly you probably did OK; this is Google and these are hard questions overall" or words to that effect.

It was definitely tiring; the fourth one actually got into some gnarly stuff that was working me quite hard. In the fifth I suffered that effect where you can hold three buckets of info in your head but actually need to be able to hold four so one keeps falling out either end. It was all good and the guy was sympathetic. Everyone seem stoked to be working there and it was refreshing to see a job where they want both sysadmin and programming skills. So far, my skills in both have been a hindrance or confusion getting work: recruiters and employers can't decide which I am, and whether, if I'm both, how I can be any good at two things. (Answer: don't own a TV)

So, we'll see... couple of weeks for a result from the search engine now.

Entering the Church

I have a few hours to kill before my late flight out (Google kindly accommodated my request to poke about Dublin a bit). So what better way to spend 20mins than in the company of Scientologists? "Lured" by a free stress test I went up and tried it out. I was honest about my aspirations, blockages, relationships, and so on. The conclusion: the needle was hardly twitching so I'm just not that stressed and there weren't really any products to sell me. That was it. Apparently I'm basically sorted as far as my Dianetics consultant was concerned. If I wanted to learn some more, here's a leaflet. Ah well, curiosity satisfied!

Right then, dinner time. At least this one's on Google's tab...

Posted by Paul Makepeace at November 29, 2005 17:56 | TrackBack