I interviewed at Google twice. Once around 2006 (I think), the other in 2011 or 2012.
The first time I had one interviewer who wanted to ask me a question about mixins and was flustered because I mentioned that I’d just finished adding mixins support to Objective-C while sitting in the waiting room and she wasn’t expecting candidates to know what they were. I also had one with a simple data structures question that I got embarrassingly wrong. I wasn’t offered a job that time.
The second time, I had a more relaxed time. I was interviewing in Paris and my main reason for doing it was that I wanted Google to pay for me to visit a friend who lived in Paris. Whether they offered me a job was far less important, I just viewed it as a half day I’d spend talking to some fellow geeks. That went much better and they offered me a job, but with a choice between a city I didn’t want to live in or a project I didn’t want to work on. The interview was fun though. No silly puzzles. A token amount of whiteboard coding. I remember proposing a hopscotch hash table as a solution to one problem and the interviewer hadn’t heard of it, so I had to draw a lot of pictures of hash tables, but it was a fun discussion.
Both times, it was a good turning point for my career. The first time, when I got the rejection, I sulked, locked myself in my room for 24 hours, wrote a new Objective-C runtime (which people are still using, some in places I really don’t think you should use Objective-C). I signed a contract for my first book shortly after and realised I could live quite comfortably consulting.
The second time, I had another offer from Cambridge and the Google choice convinced me that this was the one I wanted to accept. I am still, two jobs later, working on the same project I joined back then, only now trying to ship it in production rather than doing early-stage research.
I joined Microsoft in 2018, which was the peak ‘New Microsoft’ era, back when Nadella was saying all of the right things about inclusiveness and open source and before it became obvious that he had zero follow-through. Microsoft bought GitHub shortly after I joined and we were told that they had similar offers from MS and Google but GitHub thought Microsoft’s open-source culture was a better fit than Google’s. It reminds me a lot of the article. I don’t regret this move: I worked with an amazing team of microarchitects and learned far more about how server-class chips actually work than I could have done almost anywhere else.
