So contrary to some self-inflicted rumors, I’m not off to Google London or Sydney. My wife has taken a new contract here in Adelaide so we’ll be staying here for at least another 12 months.

It is kind of disappointing, but I’ve been doing the Google recruiting process for a week short of 3 months now, been though 5 interviews (with somewhat mixed results – yes, I’ll do a post about that), turned down the opportunity to do more interviews for some position I had no interest in and the last message I had from Google HR was that they would have “concrete clarification” about other positions for me on Wednesday. That was Wednesday three weeks ago.

So apparently Google have done studies which show that slowing page load times from 0.5 to 0.9 seconds cuts traffic by 20% – people just don’t wait around. Perhaps I might recommend a similar study for the recruitment process?

OTOH, all the Google engineering staff I met or talked to were great. So all in all it was a mixed experience – if you are thinking about trying it I’d recommend it, but I’d also recommend not trying anything too complicated (like saying yes to a recruiter from another continent..)