Classified Interview

As some of you may know, I have been trying to get a job with Google for the last couple of months (yes, it actually takes that long). I had what I hope will be my final interviews in Dublin yesterday.

Before they interview you, they make you sign a non-disclosure agreement, because they are uber-secretive, so I hope I'm not revealing anything here which would ruin my employment chances...

Anyway, the point is that I was interviewing for a position as a software engineer. This is a broad term, at the best of times, and so I asked the recruiter to be more specific. The reply was that I would be working on "Internal Systems", which comprises a multiplicity of different things, among them finance & billing software. No more information was forthcoming.

I went to the interviews with a distinct feeling that I should be more prepared than simply knowing that it is IS and some finance&billing. As it turns out, this lack of knowledge on my part turned out not to be a problem. I was asked to write Java code to do a series of different things (my favourite was to find the smallest element in a stack in constant time), and there was no real mention of what the job would entail until I asked the second interviewer.

The second interviewer seemed unable to answer my questions, due to the Google culture of secrecy (which just makes it all the more enticing!). He was able to tell me that they do deal with some finance & billing, but that they mostly work on other things. Unfortunately, he was not at liberty to discuss any of those other things! He was able to tell me that they code in python, a lot and that they use Bayesian methods for one of their projects, but other than that, I am still completely in the dark.

So if Google call me in two weeks to offer me a job (fingers crossed), I will accept it on the basis that they hire programmers to work on cool problems, but I won't know anything about these cool problems until I show up for work! (and once they let me in on the secrets, I will, of course, not be telling anybody who reads this blog! :P)