Baby steps to a new job
Posted by Gretta Cook, Software
Engineer, Google Seattle
In late 2004, Google opened an engineering office
href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=720 4th Avenue, Kirkland, WA&sll=47.67842,-122.195236&sspn=0.001994,0.004951&ie=UTF8&om=1&ll=47.678522,-122.195649&spn=0.00942,0.021651&z=16&iwloc=addr"
id="sux:" >near Seattle
heard great things from my friends who worked for the company down
in California, and I was eager to join their ranks in this new
local office. But the timing was all wrong: I wanted to spend a few
years at home with my new baby.
Elliott and I had lots of fun. We went to the park and the library
together. We read nursery rhymes and played peek-a-boo. We baked
muffins and did finger painting. We did not, however, debate the
relative merits of our favorite cache replacement policies, or
write and debug multithreaded C code. So by the time Elliott was
ready to start preschool and I was ready to go back to work, I had
to ask: Would I still be able to pass a Google interview, or had I
forgotten all of my technical skills?
If I wanted to land the job, I had to get serious: I needed to
brush up on my data structures and algorithms, my coding, not to
mention general interview skills. For the next few months, I hired
a babysitter to come and watch Elliott one afternoon a week. I
split that time between studying my college computer science
textbooks and participating in online coding contests. The coding
contests were particularly valuable because they forced me to work
through the design and coding stages quickly, just like in an
interview. The details of the standard Java and C libraries came
back to me as I scrambled to get my contest code to run before time
was up. I even asked friends to do mock interviews with me so I
could get used to writing code on a whiteboard again.
In the end, all of this paid off. My day of interviews went really
well, and I got the job!
The Seattle-area office and Elliott turned three recently;
they're both thriving. I feel very fortunate to have the two of
them in my life. And I'd encourage anyone — including new moms
– who is interested in
Google to go for it.
Tags: , Cook, engineer, google, Gretta, Posted, SeattleIn, software