Don't get me wrong. I loved working at my last startup, and luckily things went really well and the company was acquired by a multi-national firm based on the s

Don't get me wrong. I loved working at my last startup, and luckily things went really well and the company was acquired by a multi-national firm based on the strength of one of our websites. I've also worked at unsuccessful companies and have faced redundancy. However, I'm at a decent, growing company and am earning good money, and given my experiences with some startups the work can be exciting, but the hours are long and the money much better than what you'd find at an agency. I spoke to some Googlers fairly recently, which prompted me to ask this question on here. They seemed fairly put off by someone wanting to program using .NET and acted as if someone who would go into a Google interview armed with C# would be laughed out. For all I know, Google might not be a perfect fit for me, but I love the kind of work that they do, and the idea of working on scalable products definitely interests me. It's also one of, if not the best place to work in the world, and they have offices all around the world so I wouldn't be tied to one area should I decide that I'd like to move to America. There is bureaucracy in most companies and I bet Google isn't any different, but it's a great environment and I'd be a lot happier going through code reviews on complex projects with smart developers than building typical websites and applications.