How hard was it to learn these tools as a contractor? I hear that Google is more aggressively making their tools open-source to help the portability of their engineers' skills. Specifically, friends have told me that onboarding at Google is difficult because every tool is a proprietary one built on top of more proprietary systems. In addition, people who leave Google have trouble interviewing because they rely heavily on tools that are unavailable outside of Google. By beginning to contribute more to open-source, I think that it has the potential to make interviewing at and joining Google a smoother experience.
Good question. I found onboarding at Google really fun and interesting. I took several great classes, the best being the end-to-end class that in 8 hours let you write code that used most of Google's infrastructure - that class was so awesome that I would have payed Google for that day at work :-)
Also, they had code labs that are self paced modules for learning specific tech. I didn't spend much time at work doing code labs, but I could access them at home with my corporate laptop and I went through about a dozen of them at home. One other nice thing is even mentioning that you couldn't figure out something from the documentation or code labs would cause someone to jump in to help you.
Also, I don't think that people leaving Google have problems getting other jobs :-) The retention rate at Google is surprising low, given the pleasant atmosphere there. People leave to go elsewhere, start their own companies, etc. I was 63 when I worked there, and although it was probably not the most awesome place I worked, it was really great.
Apply for a job if you are interested, or go the easier route and get a contractor position.
Onboarding at Google was great; Unlike similarly-sized and oft-mentioned competitors, Google has a set of really good classes that take you through the various systems, showing their design, reasoning, historical anecdotes, etc. Each of these has a more in-depth version, as well as a couple of classes called "Searching Shakespeare" that are designed as a two-day full-stack quickie to build something that uses a little of ever piece.
