✿ Summerrainx ✿

Yes I’m going to talk about it now.

It’s going to be something I’ll probably tell my grandkids.

So yes, I’ve disappeared for a year – never bothered to update properly, just randomly talked about makeup, and stopped blogging. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know why. But I think it was a nice break, away from that ever changing Web world, away from all that rss feeds and things popping up at you and the social media and stuff.

Too much information.

I think sometimes with ten million things popping in your face you want to sit and go somewhere to read a nice book, or to feel special when you get a nice birthday card from a friend, or to walk barefoot on the seaside, or to spend a week without the Internet. 

Although I’m not sure why in my absense I still could get 250 friends at Facebook and 150 friends at Twitter.

I think it has got to do with pretty pictures. Because I definitely wrote bimbotic things in there, because that is what I wanted people to believe. From all the makeup photos you’ve seen of me!

Well, so I’ll speak of it now. I figured since two years have passed I can talk about the interview I had with Google. Now that I got myself a real job in a real company and people can’t google me and say: Why the hell does she keep talking about Google? And since the craze is over with the Google thing I guess I can blog about it now.

Plus failure isn’t nice.

And since all of you know know that I am a software engineer and I don’t think Google actually has many software engineers in the Netherlands you know that I did not get into Google.

—

For the longest time, I wanted to work for Google. I can’t remember how long, but pre-IPO, when there was a couple of hundred people in the company. Maybe in 2003. I used Blogger since goodness knows when Google acquired Pyra Labs which owned Google. I had one of the first Gmail invites which I happily sold off for 50 bucks a pop. I thought the company was cool. It still is. I kick myself now and then because that was long time ago and I knew that Google was going to be the greatest thing in the next five years and still I bought zero Google stocks. If I could look back then, I would have bought a whole TON of Google stocks. But I like something like 19 and I had no idea how to buy stocks. I still don’t. I suck at that.

My dad oftens asks me why didn’t I tell him that Google would be great. It’s weird, but I was so insanely crazy about joining Google back then he should have just bought those stocks. Then now he’ll be retired and living with my mom in the Carribean or something.

—

So I did something with Google in 2005 which is another story but in 2007 I was in the middle of my MSc in Computer Science and I had to find an exjobb. Exjobb in Swedish terms means Master Thesis. And although I really enjoyed what I was doing aka HCI (Human Computer Interaction), I seriously wanted to leave Linkoping because it was too small and quiet and I lived in Singapore almost all my life and having to face less than 10 people on the streets sometimes was just too much to bear.

So I had done one year of Graduate School, and had one year more to go. And I didn’t want to do it in the university. So I started applying to companies around Sweden, since I had 12 hours of Svenska, and I looked into the Google Jobs website and I decided to apply for the position of Associate Product Marketing Manager internship and a couple of full time jobs. I figured a nice Summer internship would be good, then I would return to the rest of my course in a very Googly way.

So why Marketing? You say. Your education is in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and you are a software engineer now??? Oh yes, for some weird strange fluke of nature, I’m kind of addictive compulsive. Which means that when I like something I like it very much, and for some reason I liked Marketing, and Technical stuff, and they had to go hand-in-hand some way or other. So you can say that I’m a software engineer pretending to be a marketer, or a marketer pretending to be a software engineer. I don’t think the skill is very valued so for the past few years I’ve been trying to suppress that. Or maybe it is also because people tend to put other people in boxes. But it doesn’t matter anymore what other people think.

So it was great that few weeks after applying, I got a call from the University Coordinator! He was Swedish by the way, so we spoke a few Swedish words and it was funny, he talked to me for a bit, and then said that he would arrange for two interviewers to call me. He was really nice and I was super excited that day.

—

And so my next post would be what happened. And yes of course I did go on-site to San Jose. And yes, I did talk too much about Twitter two years ago when Google was all about Dodgeball. Which they acquired. And shut down. I think I probably reached almost the very end of the interview, but you would have to wait for that story!