"Google's apparent academic focus is what puts me off. That and the doubt about whether interesting work is done outside of their main campus.
I'm self-taught and have been programming and making software from scratch for 15 years and have been pretty successful at it."
The academic focus puts lots of people off. I know absolutely incredible engineers with very good educations who wouldn't make it through the hiring process because they haven't been in a classroom in 20 years...ergo, their knowledge of easy-to-lookup trivia required to pass the gatekeepers isn't up to snuff.
I know one guy who walked out of a Google interview after they started in with the trivia stuff, his response was "are you kidding me with this?" Picked up his stuff and left. He felt it was extremely disrespectful and wouldn't have been a good selector for a successful employee anyway.
The academic focus puts lots of people off. I know absolutely incredible engineers with very good educations who wouldn't make it through the hiring process because they haven't been in a classroom in 20 years...ergo, their knowledge of easy-to-lookup trivia required to pass the gatekeepers isn't up to snuff.
I know one guy who walked out of a Google interview after they started in with the trivia stuff, his response was "are you kidding me with this?" Picked up his stuff and left. He felt it was extremely disrespectful and wouldn't have been a good selector for a successful employee anyway.