Hardcore how? I'm curious since I had an interview at ITA yesterday which had me flashing back to the interview I had at Microsoft [mumble] years ago.
BTW, do you know what they're working on at the Google Cambridge facility? I know that it opened within the last year, but I haven't been able to figure out what kind of work they're planning on creating there...
Well, hardcore might be a little too strong. Two guys (one in an earlier phone interview) asked me fairly tough distributed-algorithm questions, which is not a field I'm very familiar with. Another asked me a weird probability question that turned out not to have any clearly correct answer. Nothing they asked me was on the level of ITA's famous puzzles. I was a bit intimidated because both the guys I talked to yesterday have PhDs in scary esoteric branches of CS, and because I had met both of them before and they both remembered me better than I remembered them.
The Cambridge office is still very small, although it sounds like it will probably grow a lot in the next year or so. A few of the engineers are working on random projects that no one else in Cambridge is working on. The rest are doing something with cell phones, but they wouldn't tell me anything more specific even after I signed an NDA.
Google generally doesn't hire people for specific projects; they hire people they think will be good employees, and then match them up with projects, usually with a lot of input from the employee. One guy told me about how when he first started, they just had him look at a database of about 1000 projects, and asked him what he'd like to work on. Apparently working in the Cambridge office does not mean that you have to work on the same thing(s) as anyone else in the Cambridge office, although I'm kind of hoping to work with real people for once, instead of abstractions on the other end of a phone line.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-09-08 02:32 pm (UTC)BTW, do you know what they're working on at the Google Cambridge facility? I know that it opened within the last year, but I haven't been able to figure out what kind of work they're planning on creating there...
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Date: 2006-09-08 04:11 pm (UTC)The Cambridge office is still very small, although it sounds like it will probably grow a lot in the next year or so. A few of the engineers are working on random projects that no one else in Cambridge is working on. The rest are doing something with cell phones, but they wouldn't tell me anything more specific even after I signed an NDA.
Google generally doesn't hire people for specific projects; they hire people they think will be good employees, and then match them up with projects, usually with a lot of input from the employee. One guy told me about how when he first started, they just had him look at a database of about 1000 projects, and asked him what he'd like to work on. Apparently working in the Cambridge office does not mean that you have to work on the same thing(s) as anyone else in the Cambridge office, although I'm kind of hoping to work with real people for once, instead of abstractions on the other end of a phone line.