She graduated with a liberal arts background and was an engineer at Google? I graduated with a degree in computer science and I can't even get them to call me and setup an interview. I'm a smart guy with some good work experience under my belt already and my resume looks great.
Google likes to hire women. They go out of their way to do so. (So does Microsoft.) That substantially raised her chance of getting an interview and a job.
You probably went to the wrong school. Google is notoriously discriminating when it comes to pedigree even if you have a decade of post-school experience under your belt.
Maybe her liberal arts background gave her an advantage? There must be thousands of people with more or less identical world class CS background at Google. They might consider having someone with a different perspective on things a good thing. Even if you are a programmer, having a big picture understanding of things beyond code and algorithms can be a huge advantage.
Agreed. I mentioned something like this in a comment the other day- a liberal arts background can be a massive help to one's ability to function as a programmer, and when I was hiring programmers at my old job, I routinely found that candidates who had spent some significant time outside of the CS building tended to work out better than less well-rounded candidates.
There's a company in the UK that has been profiled on HN before-- their name escapes me now-- but they are famous for hiring Oxbridge liberal arts graduates and training them in computer science and software development. Anybody remember who I'm talking about?
According to her bio on the Alphonso Labs team page, she graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Princeton University. Perhaps she meant that her education at Princeton overall had a liberal arts flavor?
Hey, I have some questions assuming you're a Google employee.
- In the selection process, how important is pedigree on the resume as bane mentioned? I graduated at the top of my class but from a mediocre university and with a B.S. in IT (not CS), and I've wondered if this has hurt me in the selection process. I've interviewed twice at Google, performed very well, but got rejected in the end both times. Last time I actually got rejected, then offered another position, and then rejected a second time, lol.
- Does a recommendation from an existing employee give you a boost in the selection process? Google claims the process is 100% anonymous but I've wondered about that. I made a contact with one of the interviewers last time and I'm wondering if it'd be smart or even kosher to ask the guy for a plug.
If you've gotten through to the interview stage then it doesn't matter what school you went to. Re-examine whether you did perform well in those interviews. :)
Recommendations from people you know and have worked with and who can vouch for how awesome you are are valuable. Recommendations from someone you spoke to once aren't.
