My wife interviewed then... She was an Admin Assistant for a CEO of a fairly large pharmaceutical company in the bay area. They asked her what she wanted to do and she responded she would and could perform quite well as an admin asst. They they said, "no, what do you want to do?" I think they were asking about pottery or saving whales or whatever. My wife didn't get it; nor the job. If only she could have said "Chase Rainbows". sigh (edit: words)
That's actually not a bad thing in my book.
When I was at the beginning of my career, the fact that most companies completely disregard any non-work-related experience was extremely frustrating to me. I'd been tinkering with computers my whole life, working on stuff far above and beyond your average "just learned it in class" folks, and it was all irrelevant unless qualified by work experience.
Of course today its commonplace to show off your "hobby-based experience" to employers via a Github page and F/OSS contributions, but back then it wasn't.
And please don't email code samples through BITNET because each IBM SYSOP has their own different home brew set of EBCDIC<=>ASCII translation tables. (That's why C has trigraphs!)
Senior Operations Analyst -- Knowledge of scripting languages (Korn Shell, Perl and/or Python)
Korn shell surprises me! I thought that Google was always a Linux shop, and never used any other Unix. Was Korn shell ever popular on Linux, as opposed to bash?
I didn't use shell back in 1999, but I thought that bash was already popular back then. bash was apparently the first program that Linus Torvalds got running on Linux, back in the early 90's.
I saw a bit of early Perl at Google when I worked there, but it was mostly all Python. I never saw any Korn shell, although I guess bash is compatible with Korn shell, so maybe that's what they meant. Or it was written by a recruiter who copied from other common job postings at the time.
I'd argue it's pretty standard, I mean you don't have to use it.
I find lunch at work already a pretty big perk, where it's not offered it's an easy E5-7 per day (I can't be arsed to make it at home), that adds up over a year.
I almost did. My professor would become Google's director of research and when she did she encouraged me to send a CV as I was about to finish my degree in C.S. I sent it but didn't get hired. Maybe I was just not Google material (i.e.: not good enough) but the official answer I got was that they were focussing on hiring U.S. residents at that point which I wasn't.
I remember reading stories from the era following this (maybe the late 2000's) where getting hired by Google was incredibly difficult. As in "You're already a superstar, waste 6 months of your time going through a complicated and disorganized process, and still get rejected" difficult. Made me wonder how they actually managed to hire anyone, let alone thousands of employees.
> This means we base employment decisions exclusively on our current business needs and the given merit of a candidate. We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job.
I suggest they were incorrect in their claim not to be influenced by those things - that's why they have a diversity problem now.
Edited to add: In 1998 I probably would have read this and cheered it as a place where diversity was recognised and welcomed; in 2018 I read it as "we don't feel we have to do anything about our unconscious biases, which we're satisfied with"
"We encourage excellence at all levels in our organization, and are not influenced by race, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, handicap, religion, or any other factor irrelevant to doing a great job."
[+] [-] sicnus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelmachine|7 years ago|reply
>> Several years of industry or hobby-based experience
Key takeaway is “hobby-based”
[+] [-] codingdave|7 years ago|reply
So, sure, they were fine with hobby experience. But only if backed by solid CS chops.
[+] [-] octorian|7 years ago|reply
That's actually not a bad thing in my book. When I was at the beginning of my career, the fact that most companies completely disregard any non-work-related experience was extremely frustrating to me. I'd been tinkering with computers my whole life, working on stuff far above and beyond your average "just learned it in class" folks, and it was all irrelevant unless qualified by work experience.
Of course today its commonplace to show off your "hobby-based experience" to employers via a Github page and F/OSS contributions, but back then it wasn't.
[+] [-] santix|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berbec|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dafrankenstein2|7 years ago|reply
wow who was that chef?
[+] [-] mahmoudhossam|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
[+] [-] redlorryyellow|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
[+] [-] flal_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth_buster|7 years ago|reply
What an understatement.
[+] [-] Klathmon|7 years ago|reply
I couldn't imagine my code impacting 2 billion users, but the chrome team has to every goddamn day.
[+] [-] chubot|7 years ago|reply
Korn shell surprises me! I thought that Google was always a Linux shop, and never used any other Unix. Was Korn shell ever popular on Linux, as opposed to bash?
I didn't use shell back in 1999, but I thought that bash was already popular back then. bash was apparently the first program that Linus Torvalds got running on Linux, back in the early 90's.
I saw a bit of early Perl at Google when I worked there, but it was mostly all Python. I never saw any Korn shell, although I guess bash is compatible with Korn shell, so maybe that's what they meant. Or it was written by a recruiter who copied from other common job postings at the time.
[+] [-] danmg|7 years ago|reply
There's a lot of overlap between bash and ksh scripting, but it's not 1:1.
[+] [-] stillworks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jankey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
This seems like a good reason not to work somewhere.
[+] [-] ppierald|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|7 years ago|reply
I find lunch at work already a pretty big perk, where it's not offered it's an easy E5-7 per day (I can't be arsed to make it at home), that adds up over a year.
[+] [-] joe-user|7 years ago|reply
I'm curious; why do you feel that way?
[+] [-] seattle_spring|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcatalfamo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcooks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerng|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devilmoon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleiba|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octorian|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] f055|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chintan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronilan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] person_of_color|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrumlow|7 years ago|reply
Not anymore eh?
[+] [-] learnstats2|7 years ago|reply
Edited to add: In 1998 I probably would have read this and cheered it as a place where diversity was recognised and welcomed; in 2018 I read it as "we don't feel we have to do anything about our unconscious biases, which we're satisfied with"
[+] [-] tinkerteller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeandejean|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HugoDaniel|7 years ago|reply
Somewhere somehow things took a different turn...
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+salary+discrimination
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+race+discrimination
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+age+discrimination
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+religion+discriminati...