Marching Along

One fun but disconcerting activity during the Google trip was our visit to the Computer History Museum, just down the road from Google HQ. Think about it: We've already had computers long enough (and in enough flavors) to warrant a museum about them. What was disconcerting about the visit was how many of the systems I had owned, operated, or both - including a mainframe that used punched cards. Typing data onto punch cards at John Hancock in Boston was my first computer-related job. Emphasis on related. Speed and accuracy were a curse and a blessing, since finishing my work early meant having nothing to do for the rest of the day. It also got me a reprimand from the boss that I was making others look bad and didn't have enough experience yet at the firm to be promoted. No surprise that I gave up the attempt to conform after only about 6 months. Even for a high schooler, I could see this was a dead end.

Despite such an unsatisfying early experience, I bought my first computer in 1982 while taking an intro to programming course in Panama, and promptly got distracted by Zork! Luckily, programming came easily to me, so my grades didn't suffer. A few years later, Howard and I built a hard drive for an Atari ST using parts contributed by my brother, Ken. We even reformatted it from MFM to RLL, effectively doubling the capacity to a whopping 40 MB. Wow. All of this was well in advance of hard drives becoming common on home computers, and back when you had to do more system administration for even the simplest PC.

Shortly after that, I bought one of the very first truly portable, laptop-style computers, a Toshiba T1000. Mitch Kapor donated one of these to the Computer History Museum, and seeing it surprised me. There weren't a lot of people who had them. (You can see a shot of it by looking at the Visible Storage collection). It had a half-height screen and weighed probably 10 pounds. Of course, there was no GUI back then. I used edlin, a sort of vi for DOS. When Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 came out, every "feature" involved either a complicated series of text commands or function key combinations. Even so, working with it didn't seem particularly difficult; mostly it was just tedious command-memorization. When the first Apple (and then Windows) GUIs came out, it seemed like magic. Simple tasks were suddenly simple. Who knew? I even managed to convince my boss that installing email in the company (Eudora - which would work in our multi-system environment) would be a true benefit to the business. Isn't that funny! In short, I've participated in the various computer revolutions throughout the decades from the 70's to now, including having PC, MAC and Linux networks at home, at various points in time. They were all fun tools, but the emphasis is/was on tools.

Perhaps that is why I was mostly annoyed by, and not particularly amused at, being called a "microsoftie" by a colleague the other day. It was intended to be an insult -- this guy's idea of a sell-out is anyone who gets frustrated by command-line-driven programs and/or owns a PC -- and came in response to my exasperation at the arcane aspects of R and LaTeX, which make even the old text environments seem simple to use. I guess this just proves that self-image doesn't necessarily coincide with how others perceive you. I've been so busy congratulating myself for persisting in a difficult goal (PhD in CS) at such a late point in life, that I've completely overlooked how frustrating it must be for others to deal with me. God knows it probably takes the patience of a saint. Luckily, my advisor is neither sarcastic nor insulting; he is very supportive. So I will continue to march along and hope to get my PhD one of these days.

Google Workshop Report

Google invited me to attend the first Google Workshop for Women Engineers, which was held at their Mountain View "campus" on January 19 - 21, 2006. (See Album for a few photos of the Googleplex). I wasn't particularly interested in working for Google -- love the products, just don't care for big companies. Ah, but then I got to talk with a bunch of "Googlers" (as they call themselves), tour the campus, and get some insight into their development environment, corporate philosophy, and company goals. So yeah, I changed my mind: working at Google might actually be fun.

The all-expenses-paid trip to California was part of Google's concerted effort to hire women (as well as men). Since there are few of us out there, getting women to apply for jobs at Google has been a challenge. Marisa Mayer (one of the VPs at Google) claimed Larry Page wants to reach a 50-50 ratio of men to women at Google, while maintaining a high standard of quality. Statistically, the goal is a loooong way off, especially if they also want to meet their general hiring goals of another (1000? 2000?) programmers in the next year or so.

Walking around the Googleplex (mostly deserted on that Saturday) gave me a good feeling about the company and the work atmosphere. Being a PhD student, my future research options in corporate America are limited. But Google does a lot of in-house research, and they are very interested in hiring PhDs. Most of their work stays at Google (very few papers are published), which means it won't build up your citation list. Having Google on your resume, though, probably wouldn't hurt.

According to the recruiters and engineers I talked with, the hiring process is pretty rigorous. The first step is the phone interview. You'll go through several. If you pass, they will invite you for on-site interviews. There is no set number of interviews, but they said it typically ranges from 5 to 8. At about 45 minutes per interview, that's a pretty long day on the farm. And, of course, they expect you to know your stuff. Don't claim to be a Java programmer if you're really just learning the language. Interviewers will often ask for on-the-spot coding, and probe to see just how well you know your subjects. The interviewers represent different teams, and more than one team must be interested in you as a candidate. If only one team gives you the thumbs up, that's not enough. Google wants people that can fit in lots of places.

A final comment: internships are a great way to get a foot in the door. The interview and hiring process isn't nearly as tough as it is for regular employees, and they pay very well. (OK, that's what they say, and no actual figures were given for internship salaries so I can't verify). If you do an internship and work well with your team, you've got a really good chance of being offered a position once you graduate.

As for me, I don't think that an internship at Google is very feasible this late in the game. Unless the work directly contributed to my dissertation research. Since that area is digital libraries.... hmmm, maybe.

Spotted in Aruba

Kododo blauw lizards could be seen throughout the gardens at the Hyatt hotel. The aqua color stands out on the flagstone, but looks natural when seen next to the stunning waters off the beach. More photos of the stunning hotel property as well as Aruba in general are in the Scrapbook section.

Diaretics

My track record on diaries is pretty miserable, in large part because I hate rereading any part of them. Whether this one will work out better in the long run remains to be seen. It at least has the advantage of being easy to access and update. And yes, diaretics is a play on both the pharmacology and scientology words.