> they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.

Like many things about the way Google was run, I really didn't appreciate Memegen enough until I left.

Tell me about it. I can see now the rest of my career is going to be "how, in any way, can I make this place just one tiny step closer to what I experienced at Google?"

I can trace a lot of the mistakes I've made (and continue to make) in my career to the fact that I started at Google, setting my baseline assumption of organizational competence and personal intelligence way, way, way too high.

What was your role/job title?

I worked as developer support for Google cloud (for Platinum/gold customers). I worked alongside their FTE support staff (called TSEs) and the SWEs and SREs on many GCP projects like App Engine and Spanner. I loved it, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, etc. But customer support burns you out after a while, and I figured I learned enough for a proper engineering job elsewhere, so that's what I did.

Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.

How did you arrange getting into a gig like this? Do you cite it on your resume as a Google contractor gig? Did it help your career much?

1. I didn't arrange it, it basically landed in my lap. I was near homeless, and I was lucky that my firm found me on some job board. I think the main qualifier they wanted was somebody knew some amount of Linux and programming, who could learn anything quickly, and didn't come with too much baggage/experience of how "things should be". If you want to apply, look up (edit).

EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: [email protected]

2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.

3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.

What’s memegen?

What they don't tell you is that it's basically the nerve center of Google's internal culture. If you ever want to find out what the latest news is, get a pulse on the current mood of googlers, or even to see if there's an outage somewhere, the quickest way was to check Memegen.