When people hear that I work on Live Search they sometimes ask me this.  I can truthfully say "no."  There are a variety of reasons for this, some reflect my personal motives and others reflect my experience with the big G.  It turns out I interviewed at Google, and I'll get in to that below.  The gist of it is just that they aren't compelling to me in the way that Microsoft is.  Here's what happened, and here's why:

1) Google's interview process was terrible!  Just shamefully bad!  Let's start at the beginning....

They asked if I wanted an SRE job.  I was bailing from my previous deteriorating group along with a few other folks, so I said "sure, let's interview."  Google's reputation for being awesome is pervasive, and I wasn't going to pass up an interview for allegiance to Microsoft (they've been good to me, don't get me wrong, but IT is a cut-throat world).

Then they found out I wasn't moving to Mountain View.  Just bought a condo here, hell if I'm moving.  Okay, fine.  So the recruiter suggests to me that I could be an "IT Admin" for their corporate windows shit in Kirkland.  I was livid.  Nowhere on my resume does it suggest that I am an IT admin.  It's not my bag, and (with some hubris) I'm just better than that.  Technically better, I don't have the chops to put up with the headaches IT admins go through either.  Those guys are heroes in a different vein than me.  All the same, my reaction was "I'm a little too smart to be doing desktop repairs at your office."  Some nutsack there saw "Windows" in my resume though and decided otherwise.

I corrected them gently, and so they set me up for an SRE (Systems Reliability Engineer, basically the same job I was doing at MS) interview process.  Okay, great!  On to why the interview sucked.

The phone screens were about what I'd expect ("rattle off some technical knowledge to prove you aren't a resume padder").  The fact that I had a 30 minute long "recruiter screen" followed by two hour-long tech screens seemed excessive, but hey, everyone's banging down their doors I guess (turns out this is becoming less and less true, but I digress...).

Here's where it gets stupid.  First off, the interview process there consists of me sitting in a conference room while different people rotate in and ask me questions.  The people were friendly enough, the atmosphere seemed about as laid back and cool as Microsoft (but not more so).  The lack of offices, and use of cubes, was a bit disturbing but I think my office at Microsoft is a rare commodity in the tech world.  However, all that said, I was so unbelievably unimpressed and irritated throughout that day that I would not even consider talking to these people unless I was assured of MASSIVE changes in their interview process.

To start with, they managed to ask me repeat questions from BOTH phone screens.  They had a sheet full of questions and people would come in and pick a question and ask it.  People whined (in front of me!) about how their "favorite question" had already been taken.

And the questions!  They were unbelievably idiotic!  "Name all the members of an inode structure."  Not like, name the most relevant (mtime/ctime/atime/size in blocks/etc).  They kept pressing me for stuff that became more and more niche.  Eventually I just said "uh, I think at this point I'd Google it."  Perhaps that was a bad answer, but it was a tedious question that had nothing to do with my technical merits.  Remember, jobs like these aren't about what you've memorized, but how you apply your technical chops.

Anyway, after a litany of questions, punctuated by mediocre food (about as good as the crap we get at MS, except free) I was free to go.  And I left, and basically decided right then and there that Google wasn't for me.  Forget that they were unwilling to meet my reasonable compensation numbers, the company itself is just not for me.

2) One more thing I found out during the interview is that their promotion process is based entirely on peer feedback.  In the current Google world that probably works well.  The money flows, people are amicable, and it doesn't matter that your manager has 49 other direct reports and barely knows who you are.  But I had to ask them, "what happens if the money stops, if things stop being friendly here and promotions turn into a cut-throat game of politics?  What is your strategy?"  Blank stares.  Sorry guys, as cool and hip as it is that your org chart is flat and wide, I like a world where my manager knows who I am and has 1:1 meetings with me weekly to discuss MY career and MY growth.  I like that s/he will be incentivized based on my satisfaction, based on my growth.  A world where I have to play games and get buddy-buddy with folks to get promotions is not for me.  In fact, I think it's going to cause ENORMOUS problems at Google when the spigot gets turned off.

3) Maybe I'm crazy, but their business seems questionable.  99%+ of their revenue comes from ads served either by AdSense or ads served by their search engine.  Unfortunately, much less than 99% of their company works on these products.  They're pouring money into stuff like YouTube with no or negative ROI.  Eventually that's going to catch up, shareholders will get mad, and the situation in #2 is going to be reality.  I don't want to be in a place like that.  Is Microsoft a one-trick pony?  Some would argue yes, I'll argue no.  We make money in Search, servers, client OS, desktop productivity, and a variety of other places.  Sure, our devices section is struggling, but that's *it*.  We're a hell of a lot more diversified, and we've already managed our ridiculous growth and money binge period.

4) Speaking of ridiculous growth, Google's hiring is insanely ambitious.  They will probably top 20,000 employees within the next year.  They had less than 10,000 only a year ago.  They're doubling and re-doubling in size.  Refer to #2 again. :)

5) Working for the underdog is kind of fun.  We're in the game to grow, not sustain.  We're shooting for enormous gains, not incremental jumps.  This would be fun no matter where I was, of course, and it's very low on the decision-making tree for me -- but it's still really cool.