Google Again
Google are trying to recruit me again. I say "again" because they tried to recruit me earlier this year but then changed their minds after the second interview - which involved lots of technical stuff about Unix shell scripting and java programming. I can't quite decide what to make of this (apart from the fact that having the words "semantic web" on your web page seems to attact Google like wasps to honey). I sent a polite email back suggesting they check their records and get back to me and they responded almost immediately with a "useful to know we've interviewed you before - please go through the process again".
Problem is, my skill set is not really any different now to how it was 6 months ago and the interview process, always assuming they were actually interested in how well I knew my way around the more esoteric details of Unix and Java, seemed perfectly fair to me - I certainly didn't end up feeling I hadn't had an adequate chance to demonstrate my knowledge of the subject or my ability to solve problems on the fly. Given that we are talking a job in Dublin or Zurich and, although I enjoyed the actual interviews, I didn't much enjoy the sitting by the phone waiting for the interview to start (not to mention the fact that they failed to call on the right day once) and I found them quite draining, I'm kind of umming and ahhing about this. Preparing a non-academic CV is quite a lot of work since I have to rethink my whole approach to CVs (I've observed that businesses tend to expect your CV to fit into two pages and so forth) and the last one I sent was one of the few things that I irretrievably lost when my hard drive went phoom last winter. Google sounds like a really good place to work but going through the application process again seems like quite a lot of effort for a job which, on past experience, I probably won't get and which, due to location, I might not be able to accept even if I did get it,
Problem is, my skill set is not really any different now to how it was 6 months ago and the interview process, always assuming they were actually interested in how well I knew my way around the more esoteric details of Unix and Java, seemed perfectly fair to me - I certainly didn't end up feeling I hadn't had an adequate chance to demonstrate my knowledge of the subject or my ability to solve problems on the fly. Given that we are talking a job in Dublin or Zurich and, although I enjoyed the actual interviews, I didn't much enjoy the sitting by the phone waiting for the interview to start (not to mention the fact that they failed to call on the right day once) and I found them quite draining, I'm kind of umming and ahhing about this. Preparing a non-academic CV is quite a lot of work since I have to rethink my whole approach to CVs (I've observed that businesses tend to expect your CV to fit into two pages and so forth) and the last one I sent was one of the few things that I irretrievably lost when my hard drive went phoom last winter. Google sounds like a really good place to work but going through the application process again seems like quite a lot of effort for a job which, on past experience, I probably won't get and which, due to location, I might not be able to accept even if I did get it,