Software Engineering at Google

For 2011 I wanted to try something new again and when I was approached by Google after the Google Code Jam 2011 (I just placed in top 500, nothing too special, but I got a t-shirt :-P) I agreed to start the interview process. After 2 technical interviews, I was offered a Software Engineering Intern position at the Google Zurich office, which I joyfully accepted. This is the first post about the experience, since I started just yesterday, on the 4th of July.

I will not be able to disclose any details of course, and will have to be super careful, because of how sensitive some information can be and how strict Google is about this.

In the one and half of a working day, I already managed to:

• talk with about 50 people as I was testing the widely encouraged "butting into a conversation" at Google. Everywhere I butted in I was automatically included in the discussion, it really works :-)
• taste food in every micro-kitchen (places around the office where you can make a coffee in a professional Italian machine, cornflakes with milk, bread with ham and vegies, find various fruits, sweets, drinks, sushi and other snacking items)
• try dining a healthy vegetable salad (at least until a cook started grilling meat on the terrace :-D )
• get instructed on how to use a professional coffee machine by two doctors and one professor, with the main speaker being Italian!

Sounds like a nice place to work so far? To top the cake, I was equipped by a cutting edge hardware to perform my work duties (PC and laptop that sum to 20GB of RAM, you can guess the rest ;-) ).

These days, I will be getting accustomed to the environment, play with MapReduce and brainstorming the final shape of the project I will be working on for the next 5+ months in the Place Page team within Google Maps.