I applied to Google as an after-thought, I had bought the hype and I honestly thought I wasn’t smart enough.

Executive summary: I’m not

Apply 3 times, twice by accident and once with incomplete forms. This is convienient because you can get a phone call inviting you to an interview and an email saying they aren’t interested at the same time.

Don’t fill out the Self Evaluation: Google sent out a self-evaluation along these lines:

On the scale of 1-10 (10 is the best), how do you rate your HANDS ON experience in:
1. If you rate yourself a 10 that means that you wrote and published a book on the subject.

I filled it out on Google Docs, published it and sent them the URL… for a random comic I found on reddit (damn CTRL-key!). So rather than discuss my competance as a C programmer, I decided to tell them that MIT graduates didn’t like girls.

Ignore their phone calls: Go to another country where you have no cell-phone reception immediately after giving them your cell number. Bonus points if it is to visit Microsoft. More points if you can’t use your answering machine.

Have a phone interview at work, I think my boss finds it flattering the Google is considering poaching his most moronic employee. Assume yours feels the same way.

Actually, it’s a little worse than that — some people don’t. Which means you can’t jst assume the opposite of everything you read.

As a programmer, this is hard to get used to. We have a pretty effective mthod for sepearting wheat from chaff — does the code/idea/algorithm/bugfix work? — so the internet is a great place for finding out anything code related.

It’s a bloody awful place for finding out the answer to “What is a reasonable starting salary for a software developer?” Which, despite the fact it involves numbers and programmers, is impossible to solve.

I’ve discovered the following facts thus far:
-There are, like, a billion awesome programmers out there that can’t find jobs
-There is a shortage of programmers
-A reasonable expectation for a starting salary is between 0 and 200 000 a year
-Whoever is posting the message is a super-awesome programmer
-The author works at a startup and makes *a lot* of money
-big companies pay way more than startups
-Google is overvalued
-Google is undervalued
-I should start my own company
-nine out of ten of companies fail
-etc…

Basically 90% of the content is opinions, and even worse, most of it is what the author wants to believe or is just grabage to attract clicks.

Outliers are too noisy, the average joe doesn’t get excitied enough to post so most of the noise comes from people seeking pity (and lying) or people bragging (and lying).

Self reporting is unreliable, to be generous to the point of decpetion.

Priority one is selling ads, in this case I was lucky that there are sites that actually sell this information so they have a vested interest in it being correct. In most cases they just sell ads, and real information is expensive to produce and so bland — you don’t get to the front page of digg saying water is wet.

/ranting

The best 100% free resource I found was this post from Joel on Software. Even then it’s clear many of the posts are grandstanding (”Sr Unix Admin, No college, 92K yr plus 10K bonus” really needs some mention of experience) or optimistic (”$500,000+ from part time Internet Business” but no URL to plug?).

Here is my conclusion:
Software jobs with CS start at 50-80k out of school and then rise to 70-120k over the next 15 years.

Honestly I would’ve settled for confirmation of things I already believed:
-Big company == more money
-Longer hours == more money
-Higher cost of living == more money
-If people get excited about a job as children you get less money for it (see video games and saving the world)

I just had a conference call to prep me for some interviews Wednesday and Thursday. A 30 person conference call is weird, it keeps being interrupted by “mrmmrmrmlle has joined the conversation” and it’s so awkward when they ask everyone to introduce themselves. Actually the whole thing felt a little like a summer camp.

Apparently I should expect to answer questions like “how would you design a vending machine in hospital” rather than trick questions. That and I should review my 200 level CompSci courses (that’s easy, I only took one).

I’m heading into over seven hours of interviewing, four of one on one interviews, three of activities (tours, a discounted shopping trip), a lunch and a dinner.

The weird thing is I’ll know by Thursday night if I have the job and they want an answer Thursday night. Which is a bit tight. There are maybe 30-40 of us being interviewed as product managers and they’ll probably hire 40% of us. There are 19 groups I could end up at depending on who likes me.

It was weird what some people were worried about, for instance: would there be whiteboards involved? And they stressed that casual clothes were acceptable to no end.

I sent my resume to unnamed company today, and they insisted that I give them a plain-text copy and a “MS Word format” copy.

That causes a couple of problems for me. My latest resume is in OpenOffice format, and I can’t don’t trust it to save word documents that are pixel-perfect, so I loaded it up in Office 2007 — only to find out they required .doc format specifically.

Resumes are the most annoying documents to write because they aren’t so much about transmitting information as they are marketing material that someone will go over looking for any reason to not-choose you. So I like to go through a lot of iterations to figure out exactly what works best. And now I have to maintain

• the original OpenOffice format
• HTML version (I’m re-thinking this one)
• Word 97-2003 version
• PDF Version
• plain text version

…or just re-generate them every time (which is awful for the plain text & HTML versions). This company then wanted me to re-build my resume in an AJAX applet that kept misbehaving.

If it hadn’t been for a specific job I wanted at this company I wouldn’t have bothered — it makes me wonder how many qualified people they’re alienating with their application process.