So you want to work for Google?
Well, Google wants you to work for them, if you are a halfway smart computer science grad. To see this, do a search on any relevant computer science topic, and look at the ads.
Google is going out of its way to train you for free on their tools before you even get there. Check out this blog post at Google Code and the free tools posted here and at Google Code for Educators.
You can now learn how to use MapReduce and BigTable (actually Hadoop - the open source version of Google's internal parallel computing infrastructure) on your own laptop using VMware, while read the courseware that Google interns used this summer.
If you can master Hadoop, and you can solve some classic programming puzzles that Googlers like to ask in interviews, you too can work at the Googleplex.
If you are not good at interviews, perhaps you can start your own company using Hadoop on rented hosted machines, and just wait for Google to buy you...
In any case, going the step beyond by learning Hadoop won't hurt your chances, and it might prove useful in the future.
¶ 9/13/2007
