SIDEBAR
»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«
Career update
August 17th, 2008 by jens

FYI, I ended up taking the position at Google. I started two weeks ago, and it’s been quite exciting, despite (or because of) the “drinking from a fire-hose” aspect of learning my way around the big G.

I’m on the Google Sites team. I’ve been interested in wikis for years, and now I get to actually work on one. (Although Sites, née JotSpot, is not a typical wiki.)

I could write a lot about my experience of Google so far. It’s quite an interesting place. Merely learning about how some of their internal systems operate has been jaw-dropping. (Do you have any idea how much hard disk space Google has? Or how many CPUs? Or how many search queries they handle? Unfortunately I don’t think I’m allowed to tell…)

For now I just wanted to say that I’m not in the job market anymore. Also, that I really like all the free food :-d


11 Responses  
  • Bork writes:
    August 18th, 200812:40 AMat

    wait.. what is the future of “cloudy”?

           
  • Laurent writes:
    August 18th, 20081:35 AMat

    Nice one

           
  • Jeffrey J. Hoover writes:
    August 18th, 20087:54 AMat

    Congratulations Jenz. I hope that all goes well for you!

           
  • Dario Salvelli writes:
    August 20th, 20083:27 AMat

    Wow..!!! Great! Mithology. :-)

           
  • Daniel Jalkut writes:
    August 22nd, 200811:10 PMat

    Congrats, Jens. Getting hired at Google is still (I assume!) no small feat. I hope it works out great for both parties.

           
  • Moritz writes:
    August 26th, 20089:32 AMat

    Congrats.

    But wait, didn’t I read recently that Google is going to cut the free food?

           
  • Jens Alfke writes:
    August 26th, 20081:48 PMat

    Moritz — Nope, they’re not. Food is still great, still free.

           
  • Lauren writes:
    August 29th, 200810:07 PMat

    I thought the problem with Google was that their claim to your IP was just as onerous as Apple’s. I thought you posted to that effect a few weeks ago (though oddly I can’t find that post?)

    What changed?

           
  • Jens Alfke writes:
    August 30th, 20087:30 AMat

    Lauren — Well, I talked with enough people there to determine that, in practice, that policy doesn’t get used against people. And employees who ask in advance are often given clearance to work on a spare-time idea as their own. (I know of a few Googlers who have outside shareware projects.) At a high level, the company gives employees a great deal of discretion to make their own decisions and do what’s right, rather than trying to micromanage their outside behavior the way Apple does.

    You could say that I gave up, weakened by the allure of free food and massages. Or that I’m being realistic in accepting a great offer. It’s way too early to tell which is right; so far I’ve been too swamped with coming up to speed, to do any programming at home anyway!

           
  • Glenn writes:
    September 2nd, 20088:57 AMat

    Unfortunately I don’t think I’m allowed to tell…

    One of the great presentations at the Google I/O conference was called Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions. It provides some very interesting stats on what happens when one operates machines on the scale that Google does, including some stats on what that scale is.

           
  • Tomas Sancio writes:
    September 14th, 20086:36 PMat

    Congrats for getting the job. I believe you have a family to take care of and if you don’t cover their expenses first, you won’t have much of a head for developing your personal projects.

    Cheers.

           


»  Substance:WordPress   »  Style:Ahren Ahimsa