"Unfortunately, Google is not a company i have any interest in working for. Thanks for getting in touch, though, and good luck with your hunt."
The impression i've formed is that Google is full of people who are quite smart, but think they're really smart, and have decided to build themselves a technical ecosystem that has no interaction with the rest of the world. That doesn't sound like fertile ground for personal growth.
Also, given that i am in London, it would have meant working on AdWords, which sounds dull.
I'm also in London. Last time (5-6 different Google recruiters over the last 6-7 years) I went through phone screening with the recruiter after she was very convincing when telling me why this time would be different (after I'd given her my "standard" paragraph by e-mail about why I generally think talking to Google is a waste of my time). This was for a management position, and she then got me set up for technical interview.
The guy in question gave me a bunch of totally idiotic questions about details about filesystem implementations, and clearly didn't like it when I pointed out to him that there wasn't one single answer to the questions he raised the way he'd asked them, and proceeded to give him an outline of the various solutions that applied for a few different filesystems. He wanted specific textbook details about a filesystem that was entirely irrelevant for the position.
My impression was that he was "textbook smart", and would answer questions about the specific stuff he'd studied very well - the questions he asked fit very well with that -, and would probably excel at brainteasers, but his interpersonal skills and broader understanding of the subjects he asked me about appeared to be so weak that had I been on the other side of the table, I'd never have considered hiring him.
I "failed" that interview, only to have the recruiter bring it up in some recruitment committee or something and get it set aside and get me through to the next step on the basis of the notes I sent her of all the issues I saw with the questions. But only after she spent a lot of time lamenting the process (this is a common team with Google recruiters - every one I've spoken to has been incredibly frustrated at their own processes).
But by then I'd lost interest - the guy in question was in the group I'd have managed, and I really did not like the thought of having to deal with him on a daily basis. Or the thought of a team staffed with similar people... Or the thought of working somewhere where the HR processes are so messed up that their recruiters spends half the time they talk to me apologising about how their recruitment works.
I know there are lots of great people at Google, but every interaction I've had with their recruitment process makes me less inclined to want to work there.
> Also, given that i am in London, it would have meant working on AdWords, which sounds dull.
That's the main reason I'll never apply to Google. Not that I won't get in, but that I won't have the political klout to actually get to work on some of the fun stuff.
They're employing tens of thousands of very bright people; yet the truly interesting stuff will have been done by a few hundred / thousand of those.
What reason do I have for believing that I'll be in that small percentage rather than the other 90+% doing boring grunt work...
"Unfortunately, Google is not a company i have any interest in working for. Thanks for getting in touch, though, and good luck with your hunt."
The impression i've formed is that Google is full of people who are quite smart, but think they're really smart, and have decided to build themselves a technical ecosystem that has no interaction with the rest of the world. That doesn't sound like fertile ground for personal growth.
Also, given that i am in London, it would have meant working on AdWords, which sounds dull.