I’m currently on a two week hiatus from work as this is the only couple of weeks of the year that I’m out of school, so it’s a good time to get some well deserved rest, catch-up on things in life and around the house which seem to slip during the busy year, and get recharged and ready for the year of work and school ahead.

Much to my surprise, I received some correspondence yesterday from someone at Google who’d came across my website and thought I might be a good fit for some positions they had open. This means one of two things to me– either I’m in good company and am on the right track with my career, or they really need help. Admittedly I get unsolicited interest a few times a month most of the time as I’m sure many others do, but this was really quite different from anything I’d ever been contacted about before.

I ended-up calling the person who contacted me from Google earlier today to get more details about what position(s) I specifically qualified for, at which time I opted to go ahead and do a pre-screen interview. Unfortunately I missed making it to the next round of interviews by 1/3 of a question (most of them were multi-part questions), but I was also being quizzed on topics which I have not yet taken classes on yet (such as Algorithms), or super low level details about Unix which I’ve never had to deal with though I knew what path I’d take to get the answer needed. I was fairly familiar with everything they asked me aside from strict details about the Algorithms (I actually have a Algorithms in Java book sitting on my desk at work), I just didn’t know the exact details they were looking for right off of the cusp on the questions I missed.

Following the pre-screen the person was very friendly and encouraged me to check out their site to see if there were any other positions I thought I was qualified for and he’d put me in touch with the right people. Honestly I know I need a few more years of experience in uber geeky software engineering and Unix hacking (if not a graduate degree from a research heavy University) before I’d consider myself within the realm of a viable candidate for them based on this interview. Granted the position I was interviewing for was a Senior level position, so maybe I’ll reconsider it and check out the site sometime for something else. Most of my experience at this point with anything compilable is academic or just stuff I’ve played around with at home so I’d honestly consider myself fairly green outside of various scripting languages.

Nonetheless, it was a very interesting experience, it gives me an idea of what I level I’d need to be at to work there, and admittedly it was pretty flattering that they contacted me & that I actually almost made it to a second round.