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He responded "well we only hire experts at google".

Funny. One of the Google recruiters told me that expert at technology X meant you either wrote a book on or invented X.




Did the books have to be very good?

People in my life think I'm arrogant when I say I'm not interested in working for Google, but it's more just that it's not a "good fit" for either of us.


When I interviewed at the GOOG a year or two ago they asked me to rate myself on a 1-10 log scale for whichever skills I claimed to be proficient in. 9-10 was 'wrote the book' / 'invented the langauge' IIRC.


Yeah, Microsoft and Amazon also use that language.


Given that Google employs or has employed Guido van Rosssum, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, and Josh Bloch, I think that would be a fair assessment of what "expert" means in the context of interviewing there.

It might be apocryphal, but at one point candidates filled a "rate yourself from 1 to 10 in technology X, Y, Z" to help guide the interviewers in choosing questions. The general consensus was "if you rate yourself as a 10 in Python, there's a non-zero chance you'll end up with Guido on your interview panel"


Funny. It's almost as if one Google employee's opinion doesn't represent that of the rest of the company.




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