Recruitment: Hello from Google!

I have been waiting to post this for some time now as I wanted to get settled into my new job that I started in August. I am far enough along there that I can pass on this bit of news to anyone out there interested in how Google approaches people and what I personally thought of it.

On May 19th of this year I got an email with the above title (posted below with names X'ed out for privacy reasons). I was really flattered that Google found me interesting enough to approach for a position within their Engineering Team! I must admit my first reaction was that someone was messing with me. My friends would do that...

I responded rather carefully and turns out that it was for real. We arranged an evening phone call (my time) as they were calling from Google HQ in California. When they called we discussed a bit about me, my background and some of the work I have done including my Free Open Source Software work. They then began to explain what the work was they did, what I might find interesting there, and some of the finer points of working at Google. I had to break in at this point and ask where I would be working, here close to home or did I need to come to California? They said I did not need to come to California, I could move to any of the following locations:

• Mountain View, CA
• Santa Monica, CA
• New York, NY
  
• Kirkland/Seattle, WA
• Dublin, Ireland
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Sydney, Australia

I am not planning to uproot my family for a job so at this point I had to do the unthinkable... I said 'no' to Google, can you believe it?

They were rather nice about it and stated that they still were interested in me. Would I be interested in a few years when Google plans to open offices for the Engineering Team here in the Netherlands? I of course said I would always be interested in discussing the opportunities that Google has to offer!


Letter from Google:

Hi Eric-

My name is XXXXXXXX; I'm a talent scout for the engineering team here at Google. I came across some of your work on the Web and was impressed with your development experience - particularly the breadth of your background in Linux and your contributions to the open-source community.

I actually recruit for the Google.com engineering team here, which is the group of engineers that's essentially the mission control of Google. They're responsible for the design and development of the infrastructure for all our web applications and internal services. You'd be able to tackle some of the most unique scalability problems in the world and work on the newest products we have. It's a mission-critical role that involves a lot of coding and requires a high degree of creativity and troubleshooting expertise, so we're looking for Unix experts and great coders with broad skill sets (like yourself)! We have several positions within the Google.com department that I feel would be a good match for your skills and qualifications.

I'm not asking you to quit what you're doing now - just seeing if you might be interested in exploring opportunities with Google. If you're at all interested in the department or in Google in general, I'd love to speak with you about the opportunities we have here.

Thanks for your time, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards,
-XXXXXX
Engineering Staffing Team