Google Data

Nik talks with students at the Google booth Photo: Mikael Hansson/InfoTech Umeå"

Recently I returned from helping represent Google at the DataTjej conference in Umeå, Sweden. A national conference for female students studying IT, DataTjej has been an annual event for the last 15 years, with lectures, workshops, and networking events for the ~ 120 conference goers.

I was able to spend a lot of time talking to the attendees, both at the Google booth and at the conference dinner, and was regularly surprised during those conversations as person after person told me that they'd be too afraid to even apply for a role at a company like Google, never mind actually going through the interview process.

I told everyone who said this the same thing, and I'm sharing it now in the hope that it might help change your mind if you're feeling the same way.

When you're interviewing at Google, we want you to do as well as you possibly can, so we do our best to make sure that that's possible. We don't ask trick questions, or look for ways to trip you up; our interviewers want to see you at your very best. The very worst that can happen is that we decide not to hire you (or you decide not to join us).

Nik presenting at DataTjej

So if you're at all interested in the opportunity to work on world-changing projects with computing infrastructure that spans the planet then I'd really encourage you to apply (see http://www.google.com/students and http://www.google.com/jobs for details). You've got nothing to lose.

Posted by Nik Clayton, Site Reliability Engineer