Today I finished my first week at Google. I can't blog about the specifics of my work, as everything is confidential, but it is pretty cool! There is a big learning curve, they have tons of in-house tools and frameworks, and a massive code base, which takes a while to understand. But they have structured their 'Noogler' orientation quite well, and there lots of classes and resources to help you out. One of the things that I've found to be quite interesting is that everything has to be designed and coded to work on massive data and it has to be executed extremely fast. From an Software Engineering perspective, the main non-functional requirements are scalability and performance. I have never seen anything at this scale!
The people that work here are all very helpful, and extremely smart. I think about one third of their engineers have PhDs. There are people from all the ivy league schools, winners of the programming competitions, famous guys (like the creators of vim and emacs), etc. My boss/mentor has been very helpful, and has gone beyond just teaching me the technical aspects. He has been helping me out with lots of good career advice.
The free meals and the amenities are also quite cool. For example, every Friday they have a TGIF (Thank Google Its Friday) event. Today, because of the world cup, they were streaming the opening match and serving beer. So everyone that wanted to see the game just went downstairs (you can take the slide if you want to) and spent the afternoon drinking and watching football! How cool is that!
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