A while back as I was pondering whether to change my job or start my startup, I got a call from a Google recruiter looking for QA folks. I had just spent 2 yea

A while back as I was pondering whether to change my job or start my startup, I got a call from a Google recruiter looking for QA folks. I had just spent 2 years working for a very large software company as a research engineer after the startup I worked for got acquired. I wanted to return to a role where I would be closer to customers so I could see my work benefit the end user first hand. I reasoned this meant joining a small product team as a developer or a larger team as a product manager. So I told the Google recruiter I may be interested in a product manager role, and may be a developer role if it was a smaller team. I was flabbergasted when he told me "Frankly, you have no chance of getting those roles at Google in the near future." I have a Masters in C.S. from a top engineering school and classmates / ex-colleagues at Google in those exact roles, so I suppose this guy just wanted to hire me for the role he had been assigned, but what a shitty way of trying to do it! May be this was an isolated incident. My friends who have worked at Google have uniformly had a good experience actually working there. So I hope Google finds a way to hire or train their recruiters better to avoid incidents like this.