A lot of people interview thinking they are going to work on Google Glasses and then get allocated to corporate IT. You don't know your role at the company until the day you start.
Yes, I suppose what I'm looking for is where exactly things go awry.
Again, the impression I'd gotten from my recruiter is that I'd have more or less a commitment from Google that I'd be working on a particular team at the offer stage. In particular, that I'd know which team I was going to work on when I accepted the offer.
So it seems like either she's exaggerated that (in which case I would expect it to seem fairly obvious at the offer stage that you weren't yet assigned to a team), or that Google is in the habit of outright lying about team assignments, which I have a hard time buying.
For me, allocation, period. For all the investment made by Google in hiring me, and all the personal debt I accrued in leaving my previous employer and renting an apartment in Mountain View, it all came down to getting hosed by Google's version of the Hogwarts selection hat.
All attempts to address this were blocked by mid-level management, leaving me no other options other than continuing a job I hated or leaving. Even engineers within google who had worked with me in the past and vouched for me couldn't make a difference.
Google's allocation process is akin to Russian roulette and I got the chamber with a bullet in it.
So I left.
Now there is hope. Just like Jamba Juice lets you order off-menu smoothies, Google will let you pick what you want to do if you can find a team that will accept you. They just don't talk about it. Insist on it and I suspect you'll be fine. I wish I'd known that bit before I went there.
