Skip to main content

Day 1 at Google

Wow! Just wow! I love everything about Google. Although all day long today we just had to go through lots of presentations, and doing some paper work, it was very informative and useful. In the morning all the nooglers were ushered into the front lobby to set passwords for our Google accounts, got photographed for our badges and were led to some snack areas to give ourselves some treats and drinks. Then we sat for a day long marathon of HR related presentations and paper work. We stayed from 9 to 5 in the room except for some short breaks and lunch. What I loved about the day is how very well everything is organized. Each step is completed in exactly the intended time slot alloted for it. Well actually within +/- 3 minutes. There is a lot of information and I will definitely have to go over the slides to remember everything. Later in the day we got our badges.

Coming to lunch. It is simply superb. Well I had lunch at Google before during my on-site interviews. But every time the food was a delight to my palate. There are several cafeterias and the one we visited served Indian food. I had white rice, sambar, matar paneer and pickle. Excellent huh? The food was very tasty.

Towards the end of the day we were given a quick tour of the infamous free laundry room, gym, game room, lap pool and snack bar. Then at 5:00 pm, my mentor showed me my cubicle, introduced me to my co-workers and managers. My cubicle has lots of balloons and candy and rumor has it that once the balloons lose air we are officially Googlers and not Nooglers any more. I was given a desktop with a LARGE 30" monitor! I almost fell off my chair just looking at the size of the thing. It is really really very big monitor. I don't need 2 monitors now. The desktop was a good 2.4 Ghz Intel Dual core processor with 4 GB RAM! We then went to pick up my first ever mac - the macbook pro. It is a serious laptop. Gets really hot when running at full load but it is very thin and stylish. I got a bag with other accessories.

My mentor took care of everything for me and left. I made myself at home, went to the cafeteria again to grab my dinner. Hey the food is worth staying the extra few hours. Beats my cooking any day of the year and saves me time to cook and clean ;-) Did some more work after dinner and left for home.

The team is really good with lots of excitement, energy and very friendly. I felt at home...

Comments

Sumit Chachra said…
Glad you're liking it there!! Lets meet up in SF once I come back on 15th.

cheers!
Sumit.
May 08, 2007 4:06 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Attesting General Power of Attorney in SF

Recently I had to go through the motions of getting a General Power of Attorney (GPA) document attested in San Francisco. I am an Indian by birth. My parents were trying to buy a house back in India for me. Since I did not want to travel to India they needed a GPA so that they can act on my behalf to sign all the documents required to buy the house. The problem however is that they needed it urgently because the seller lives in UK and wants to get all the things done quickly so he can go back. My parents send me a GPA document that they obtained from a lawyer. This is a document that will give the power to my parents to buy the said property in the document on my behalf. The lawyer said that I will have to get the document attested at an Indian Consulate in USA. The closest one for me is in SF and I can drive there in about an hour from where I live. So I though it will be like a day's work to get all the things done. I looked up at their  website  for the procedure to att
150 comments
Read more

XBMC / Boxee remote control android app

I have been writing a few android apps over weekends at home and during 20% time at Google. However I never actually released any of them in the android market mainly because they were quick and dirty apps that fit my needs but perhaps would not be appealing to the general public. One such app that I quickly wrote over a couple of weekends is a XBMC remote. The media center that I use at home is XBMC and I have always wanted to have more control and faster access to my media. Using my remote to navigate through the menus is not as fast. Especially when I wanted to queue a lot of music it is very slow. So I wrote this nice little app called "XBMC remote" for my android phone to control XBMC from anywhere :). Give it a try. Search for "xbmc" in android market and install it if you use XBMC as your media center. When you first launch the app you will start with this screen. You will have to setup your web server address, username and password (if required) by
17 comments
Read more

gtkdocize not found

If you are ever configuring an app and see the message "gtkdocize not found" in Gentoo, then you need to emerge gtk-doc. I had some hard time figuring this out so I am writing it in my blog for the next time. When I saw that error message I did an "emerge -s gtkdocize". Usually it is that simple in Gentoo. But not this time. The emerge command returned no results at all. Then I searched for gtkdoc and still no luck. After searching in Google, I still did not have a solution. After thinking for a while I decided to try to search for gtk-doc. Bingo! That worked! Interestingly, this is my first post from my Virtual machine :-)
7 comments
Read more