As arguably the most desirable tech company to work for, Google is surrounded by myths about the “impossible Google puzzles.” But most of these are just that: myths. As any Google insider will tell you, Google has no interest in discovering what you would do if you were nickle-sized and stuck in a blender. Seriously. [...]

Somehow, many candidates have gotten the impression that the interview process is some elaborate system, and if their process is different from their friend’s, it must be a reason for it. The truth is so much more straightforward than that, and once you get, everything will make sense. Or that’s my hope, anyway. Here’s how [...]

UPDATE: Share this with your friends to improve your chances at winning a free copy! UPDATE 2: Raffle has completed! Thanks for playing Since everything is best in rhyming form, I will open this with a poem from an anonymous (and awesome) reader: If you’ve ever wondered how to navigate the Amazon forest, Or pondered how [...]

We call it many things – online job applications, the resume database, etc – but perhaps the most applicable is the “Black Hole.” Thousands of job seekers submit their resumes each year, hoping to get the chance to interview. But the reality is that standing out from a stack of resumes is extremely difficult. So how [...]

When I was at Google, I referred a number of candidates, and ran a little (informal) experiment. How well could people judge their performance? After each candidate completed their interview, I’d ask them how they did. Then, I’d look up their actual performance. And guess what? There was no correlation. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Why [...]

Years ago, rumors used to circulate about Microsoft interviews.  They were the hot, new company that everyone wanted to work.  With envy came the urban myths.  These rumors have since been transfered to Google, and will surely be transfered to some new company in due time. Bloggers – always desperate for links and traffic – [...]

Last week, TechCrunch re-posted snippets from an email list for former googlers. This article was set up to make an obvious conclusion: Google is not the fairy tale land of employment. Wait, wait, you mean not everyone loves their job at Google? Shocking! A logical person might point out that what one person loves another [...]

Google App Engine: “We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, [...]

Racism is rampant. Maybe this election has made people less racist, maybe it hasn’t. At the very least, I hope that it has made people realize that, yes, racism is still very much alive. As a quick illustration, check out the top 10 Google search suggestions for Obama: 30% are race-related issues: “birth certificate”, “muslim” [...]

Brought to you by Google’s 2001 search index, a quick comparison to show just how new to the scene Sarah Palin is: John McCain: 158,000 hits in 2001Joe Biden: 3,240 hits in 2001Barack Obama: 671 hits in 2001Sarah Palin: 0 hits in 2001. Despite being mayor of a small town, the internet had not even [...]