How and why I did not take a job at Google

Several times in my life I was lucky

One of these things were inheriting the best of genes from my mother and father — together.

Both of them are very smart — but had no degrees, grades at all. My mother hardly finished elementary school. My father just finished secondary school at the age of 35 while getting some KITA* from my mother.

(*for the unintiated: KITA is a management technique — it stands for: Kick In The Ass).

Then this feeling of having had smart but uneducated parents plus the feeling that I may have been missing out some actual knowledge led me to get 4 different degrees. I got none of these for the sake of getting a degree, a stamp a piece of paper. I never bothered with form only. I always got excited by meaning, by content — leading to form. Learning was such a thing.

One of my degrees is from the University of Chicago — Booth School of Business. A fancy school that often made it to the top of the b-school rankings in the past 10–15 years. I graduated from this school with high honors (top 1% of the class — actually 4 people made it out of 320, so it was slightly higher than 1%). Before starting this school — I had not even known such an expression (“high honors”) ever existed.

I surely was lucky getting into that school — and getting out with such results as well.

Where luck led me

I pushed very hard in work very early on. I was lucky to have worked together directly with some of the best managers around — who had built large businesses previously. I worked my ass of — smartly. So what they saw from me was good. Excellent. They enjoyed and appreciated it.

So I got better and better job offers through referrals. I got involved in turning around mid-sized businesses (a few 100 Mln USD in revenues each) early on in my life.

And so on.

Then I finished the b-school above and I interviewed with some of the best firms, as well.

But I wanted to run my own businesses. As I thought that what I had learnt at the expense of others could be put into good use — in my own businesses.

My infamous interview with Google

So I did.

Then after some 5 years (and about 5 years ago) into building my own stuff I got a referral for a job opportunity at Google. You know — these days it was not something I would just reject immediately as usually I did with every other offer I had received. Ok, initially I did reject it, as well — but one of my ex-classmates from UoC told me (actually he was the guy who referred me to Google) that “hey, Peter, just have a look at this — you will be able to get unbelievable resources and a tremendous opportunity here” (he was and still is working with Google). He knew what made me excited. This sentence of his surely did.

So I started the interview. It went boring as usual. The interviewer told me that it was about a Product Management job. Asked me about my past etc.

Then it came to a point at which she let me know that we were OK for the next round and if I had any questions.

I had only one:

“Will I be able to directly influence the UI of the end product?”

She asked me: “Well, why would you need that?”

I told her that: “Google is an engineering company. I think they are just too arrogantly proud of being geeks at their heart. And it leads them not to think with the head and heart of the end user — but with the head of an engineer.”

She said: “Hey, why are you saying that?”

I told her: “OK -let’s run a quick experiment. Do you have gmail? Just log in to gmail and let me know — without opening the 12 different menus and dropdowns on the user interface — where can you find the mail forwarding setting. Or be it changing your signature or pop/imap or whatever. I think all of your products are like that.”

What to say? I did not get the job. Was I surprised? Of course not. Or: slightly.

Why did I write this article?

I had thought 5 years ago that things would change for the better at Google in the longer run. They just did not.

So: if you have someone working at Google: can you ask them to improve their UI’s?

And: also: their machine learning algorithms regarding email spam. I just lose several minutes every day for Google considering something spam that is not. I keep on pressing “Not a spam”…again and again.

I know it must be a very hard subject. But hey Google — you are a 1000 Mln+ $ value company. Google — you have the resources.

And: just have a look at your other products: Google Analytics or…Android. When it comes to clarity and usability: they are behind (no, not behind Apple, only; they are behind Microsoft, Facebook and many others). You could make so much more humans happy. Please.

A question: which of these, if you click on them, will do what? Yes — it is still Gmail:

A last question: when did you last time use Google hangouts? As it is still available in Gmail:

Note: no, I do not want a job at Google, still. I just don’t. Thank you.