How To (Not) Get an Interview With The Google

Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 11:30 am. 1 comment

A week or so ago, I read Tim Bray’s post about X-Me on Facebook being a virus, and I had to respond, being one of the “little guys” that has low usage numbers. A friendly Google tech recruiter read my post, found this dusty blog, wandered over to CLG where I work, and emailed me to ask if I had any interest in working for Google.

At first glance, seems kind of cool. But I’m not moving to California, as I’ve got all my family and extended family in the Chicago area. The recruiter kindly mentions that they have a Chicago office. Nice! Let me google them up…

*stomach lurches*

It appears that the Chicago office for Google is essentially an ad sales office (fine) with 3 developers who work in a corner. The developers are (mostly) the people behind subversion, which is one of my least favorite technologies that exists right now. I am struggling to understand why so many people are in love with it, apache/jakarta is switching their projects to it, and yet CVS works just fine, barring some warts. Eclipse covers up most of those warts, and since I breathe Eclipse 24×7, I’m fine with it.

But subversion… Well, I am one of the few non-believers, apparently. It was forced on me at CLG (long story), and turned out to be slooooooooow, taking 5 minutes to sync our projects, vs maybe a minute or less with CVS. It must take extra time to not do keyword substitution (j/k) which okay, I don’t like that CVS does, but whatever.

The big one for me is that subversion crapped out on me. Our repo server died, and I had a backup on another box, but apparently one of the files had some kind of strangeness in it, such that svn couldn’t read it. Um, okay, well that’ll just break one file, right? Nope. Entire repo, dead. WTF? You gotta be kidding me. An error in a single file kills my entire 6-year commit history??? And the error was caused by svn’s file handling, as far as I can tell, as I googled for it and a few other people had the same problem. When they asked the developers about it and showed them the corrupt file(s), the developers’ answer was, “that can’t happen” (paraphrasing). Um, except it did. To him. And me too. To be fair, the developers went on to try and fix the problem(s). But problems that are this varied, complex, and almost impossible to reproduce on demand are unlikely to be completely resolved. The bottom line is, the svn guys have made their own database thang for storage, and it sometimes blows up, taking your entire repo down with it. Not cool.

Don’t tell me I should have had more backups going further back in time - that’s a cop out. I had backups, but they were useless because one file in the middle was busted. Unacceptable.

No subversion for you! Er, me. I’m sticking with good ol’ CVS, which sucks a little, but it’s a devil I know, with warts I know, and if I back up the files for it, then I know goddamn well that I’ve got a reasonably good backup of my repository even if there’s a twiddled bit in there somewhere due to disk failure or whatever.

So I was compelled to mention my anti-svn feelings to the recruiter, in as friendly and upbeat a way as I possibly could, and I asked about working on other projects or remotely for another office, and haven’t heard back. So methinks, no interview for me. Could have been an interesting experience, but seeing as I hate goofy interview questions/riddles about manhole covers, numbers of gas stations, and any of those moving Mt Fujiisms, it might be for the best.