My "how I got a job at Google" story is even more bananas.
Roughly around this same time, I was a very burned out game developer at EA. My job was doing data analytics on telemetry data reported by games. Basically, any time you started a game of Madden, the game would phone home to an EA server and tell EA which stadium you picked, which teams, game mode, etc. EA wanted to use that data to know what to prioritize in future versions. I was working on some rudimentary code to scrape those log files. Nothing that felt like making games in the least.
At the same time, my employment contract prevented me from doing game stuff on my free time. Most game companies essentially own your brain and don't let you do your own game-related stuff on non-work hours. So here I was nominally in the game industry and because of that, I was doing less stuff that felt like making games than ever before. It sucked.
In a fit of pique, I made a throwaway account on Reddit to whine about this. A complete stranger saw and said, "Well, if you know C++, Google is hiring and I could give you a referral..." I already had an interview lined up at ArenaNet in Seattle at the time. The recruiter for Google rushed to get an interview with Google going while I was in Seattle. I wasn't super interested because what the hell do I know about working on search engines and server stuff? However, I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to see a Google office. My plan was to stay in games.
Then I bombed the ArenaNet interview because the interviewer didn't know what amortized complexity was and I couldn't do a good job of explaining it. (They asked what the cost to append to a growable array was and I said "constant time on average" and they looked at me like I was an idiot.)
Somehow, I managed to squeak through the Google interview. I had no idea at the time how few people get offers. If I did, I probably would have been a lot more nervous and fucked up the whole thing.
So, yeah, I got a job at Google and moved across the country because of a whiny throwaway account I created on Reddit.
I too got a job from posting too much on Reddit. Another user told me to apply to work with him, and that became my career when academia didn't work out.
that's really cool. After some code I posted here on HN got featured on top 10, another Brazilian guy from Google asked me if he could refer me. I accepted right away. Stopped everything I was doing to study for the interview. I Applied for 3 job openings using their internal tool (two outside Brazil and one here), but never got called to an interview. Probably for the best, I suck at programming with a timer on.
