As normal I have left this stupid blog too long. As of now I am instituting weekly updates. Honestly there’s no excuse.
Back to the bams. This bam just reminded me of itself a few days ago I got this:
Hi,
We would like to a reserve a Google T-shirt for you, so please let me know what size you prefer.
We look forward to having you start with us.
I have been getting correspondence from them back and forth but I think until they asked me for a t-shirt size it hadn’t sunk in. This is the first confirmation that I am actually expected to show up. And wear clothes.
Yup, that right big-o got an internship at Google! I’m astoundingly excited. Originally I was to work in Kirkland (which is next to Seattle), but they just moved me to Mountain View (the Googleplex, in Silicon Valley). I’m going to be an Associate Project Manager Intern. The APM program is essentially a way to give newly graduated programmer-types the experience they need to become Project Managers (normally Project Managers are have some amount of experience). It is a tip of the hat to the fact that some people make better PMs than they would programmers from the get-go while recognizing that PMs are made not born.
I don’t know what project I’m going to be working on. I’m told it’s “confidential” which may be latin for “we don’t know” or it may just be that nearly everything this company does is somewhat veiled. They tend to do a much better job of keeping secrets in than, say, Microsoft. This probably has a lot to do with happy workers who are uninhibited by management (the 20% program is a notable achievement in this area, people tend to be ultra-secretive as if they believe they have the next Google and are afraid that the long timeline associated with most 20%-ers might mean that someone working 100% of the time might get the market jump). Clever.
At any rate, this is a big big deal for me, a big step in the right direction and a great opportunity as Google is clearly growing. To make a short story of my other attempts at getting an internship I can say this: I am not willing to spend my life in most of the deathtraps that I interviewed at. It is absolutely not their fault that their work is soul crushingly boring and suicide inducing, they try very hard and include cool things like bean bags, free beverages, massages, and lots of money (the greatest motivator). It is just that the work is horrendously boring. Unfortunately I invested a whole lot of time into these companies. So it was really lucky that I had such an obvious choice in Google.
I guess it does paint it in negative terms to say that “I don’t want to do any of the other jobs I could have done” but the converse is that this is very nearly the perfect job for me and certain the job that to which my experience is best suited. My other options were: investment banker (of some sort), programmer, or programmer. While investment banking would honestly be preferably to programming, the entire process of interviewing put a bad taste in my mouth. If you are stupid enough to think you are smart, you’re half way to being an investment banker. I found few of them as intelligent as they pretended to be and I suspect that most of the reason they work so hard is because in reality they’re so damned stupid and they’re trying to make up for it.
As for programming, it’s a fantastic exercise, but it is really not the sort of thing I want to do for the rest of my life. To be entirely honest I’m amazed at how good at answering dumb interview questions like “analyze this grammar and tell me what might be wrong with it” but I attribute that entirely to the Cambridge system and how much I have learnt. However as my least favorite supervisor would say, I may know these sorts of things but they are not “a part of me”, there is a vast difference between myself and the cleverest of my peers, and I am acutely aware of that difference.
The other part of that difference, fortunately for me, is that I am much more capable of carrying a conversation on with both compscis and non-compscis. This makes me a pretty good interface between the two. I also tend to understand normal people’s problems pretty well and can think with a business hat much more easily than a programmer’s hat. As I said before, these traits really lend themselves to being a PM.
And then of course there’s the fact that it’s Google. Ironic, because Google seems like it is a superstar place to work. It probably isn’t. It’s a place who’s need for resources currently outstrips it’s ability to allocate them, let alone qualify them. It has singlehandedly sucked up about 50% of Silicon Valley’s post-bust unemployed. And yet it has an amazingly good reputation. I am extremely interested to see why it has weathered its growing pains so well.
Ultimately what I’m most excited about working at good is the probability of the project I work on being shown to the general public. Further no matter what I work on, the chances are that it will have measurable results in a relatively short time. This is both because Google tends to work very quickly and to release early and often and because I will be working with a bigger group of developers.
I have to say that I was quite excited about the prospect of going up to Seattle, as the scene there is marginally cooler, Mike is up there, and there’s a lot of open lake to row on. So while I’m a little annoyed of having to go to Mountain View instead I am infinitely happier in terms of prospects, I’ll be with most of the APMs and be able to be directly compared with them. Since I actually don’t want to work in the Mountain View office long term, this might be beneficial as it will let them see how I can perform and bolster my case for a smaller locale which might tend to have more experienced managers.
At any rate, Google here I come!!! Yay!
