[squar1sm]

I didn't like this bit: "The fact that my degree says Music and not "Computer Science" from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, or CMU probably keeps me out of computer vision, AI research, and compiler design, however, just as much as it's garlic to the Google recruiters who want me to believe it's an honor to spend weeks answering questions about ping pong balls and sorting phone books for the opportunity to babysit a data center full of machines dedicated to slapping ads on the world's information."

Wow. That's a really big sentence with some amazing accusations:

1. Google is full of vampires (garlic)

2. Datacenters are babies (babysit)

3. Information is owned by the world (world's information) even though it's scraped into a Google index which you can only get to by using Google.

It also greatly bashes on all of Google for making adwords? Yay? I think this kind of snork-snork attitude is the kind of shit I don't miss about Perl Monks and the like. He just sounds hurt and mad.

[kbenson]

I think we can find less negative interpretations of those.

1. Google is full of vampires (garlic)

Garlic makes your breath stink. People may avoid you after heavy garlic consumption.

2. Datacenters are babies (babysit)

As a metaphor, it's definitely possible to do worse. The systems within the datacenter will need attention. Constantly. People are on call to handle these and other issues. There are many parallels to watching children. Which is why, as a metaphor, it works, at least from his point of view.

3. Information is owned by the world (world's information) even though it's scraped into a Google index which you can only get to by using Google.

What are you even trying to say here? I don't think Google would contradict that they take existing free information and present it to you. Their value-ad is that they make it easy to find what you are looking for, and organize it in interesting ways. That he sees Google as a marketing company that uses this ability to service ads is hardly controversial.

[squar1sm]

We can disagree. What I was trying to say with #3 is that it's just an index. You use the index by using Google. If you don't like the index, don't use Google. But they aren't stealing the world's data so ownership doesn't matter. They are indexing it and creating a new bit of information, they own that. You know what I mean? It's just an index and they respect ROBOTS.TXT just like other crawlers (but not all).

[kbenson]

I don't think we have a difference of opinion on what Google does, just on what chromatic was trying to communicate. I think he was implying that Google is a bit pretentious in their interviewing when it seemed to amount to a regular sysadmin job from his perspective. It appears what you took from it is an assertion that Google is somehow stealing data and locking it up, and that's a bad thing? I'm still not exactly sure what you took from his text on that subject, your reply seems to be justification of your position, not clarification on what exactly you interpreted and found worth rebutting.

That said, my take on his reply to your original comment is that he really interpreted it as a shit job. I'm not sure if that's just the work at the level they decided he fit at, or is par for the course, but I can see how someone who identified as a programmer may be put off by an interview where they ask "Is it a problem for you to be maintaining code but not writing it?"

[chromatic]

I think he was implying that Google is a bit pretentious in their interviewing when it seemed to amount to a regular sysadmin job from his perspective.

This, and my CV says system administrator exactly once, and that ended in 2000. Everything since then has been not system administration. To be pigeonholed into system administration because the mighty algorithm had decreed that the intersection of "Perl" and "system administration" on a CV meant "system administration" did not sit well with me.

[chromatic]

Have you ever experienced the Google interview process for SRE?

After I'd spent a couple of weeks going through phone screens which alternated between "Rah rah! Google! We solve interesting problems! We're changing the world! Work on whatever you want!" and "How do you sort a million phone numbers using the least amount of memory possible?" and that silly ping pong ball question, the recruiters started asking things like "How do you feel about getting handed code without documentation and being responsible for deploying it?" and "Is it a problem for you to be maintaining code but not writing it?"

Then again, I'd accuse myself of making this up if I hadn't experienced it more than once.

[eru]

Strange, I just went through the interview process for SRE at Google, and didn't have any such problems. (And I don't even have a degree.)

[chromatic]

It happened to me more than once--and I heard similar stories from other people. It's easy to believe that not all interviews happen the same way, so I wrote "the Google recruiters who want me to believe..." rather than "All Google recruiters".

Best wishes for your interviews.

[eru]

Thanks. I'm already hired.