If you’ve read something about me here you should know why I started this blog. I had (and still have) a big dream: obtaining an interesting Network Engineering internship at a cool company.

In order to commit myself to this goal, I decided to program my path toward it into a 10 months plan. When you do this kind of commitment you should also take into account the possibility of a fail. Then, if you decide to make your effort public opening a blog, your fail may become even bigger 🙂

That’s OK. That’s part of the game and today I’m gonna share something about this.

Google

It’s not a secret that Google is one of the best place to work for and everyone want to be part of it.

Being a Network Engineer Intern at Google would mean working on one of the biggest and most advanced networks of the world, with cool peers and surrounded by tons of interesting opportunities and projects. Awesome!

That’s why I started to think about it 🙂

Application

I’m lucky enough to have a friend and mentor who works at Google as Network Engineer and I asked him to let me know if something would have appeared on his radar. Then, one day an opportunity appeared: it was a NetOps internship position in Europe and it seemed exactly what I was looking for.

He referred me and few days later I got an email from a recruiter who kindly asked me about my background and availability for a couple of technical interviews.

Interviews preparation

I knew that Google would have asked a mix of Networking and Coding questions, so I had to focus on both during my preparation.

In summary, I did the following:

• reviewed IP routing protocols from Cisco ROUTE book.
• reviewed L2 technologies from Cisco SWITCH book.
• reviewed some networking basics from various sources, like Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume One (6th Edition)
• reviewed some Python concepts from various sources, including blogs and books like Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions.
• reviewed some Linux concepts as well.

I was pretty satisfied from this preparation process but I still thought to not be enough prepared. After all, it was Google 🙂

Technical interviews

I had 2 technical interviews on the same day, lasting around 45 minutes each.

I cannot talk a lot about them but I can say one thing: F*ck Yeah! 🙂 : both interviews went great and I really enjoyed them. My interviewers were very kind and succeeded in making me feel comfortable even if I was scared and stressed like never before. All the questions were interesting and smart: they were unconventional and forced me to think about each of them. Interviewers didn’t want only to know your knowledge level but they’re more interested about how you think about problems.

So, for example, they can start asking you about BGP and then moving to some interesting scenario where you need to optimize the whole picture. You have to ask questions and consider everything. I really like this approach and, again, I really enjoyed them to the point that I was a little bit disappointed because they didn’t last longer 🙂

Around a month later I received an email from my kind recruiter who informed me that I passed that step and now only a last one remained: a short interview with the manager of the team where the intern would have worked.

Manager interview

Here I was as scared as the first time, knowing how important was this last step. But once again my interviewer was so kind and I immediately felt more calm.

This time no technical questions were expected. He only wanted to know something more about my background and describe the project. The latter, anyway, was the issue here: during all the process I thought that the intern would have been employed in a NetOps team, working on some automation project with, of course, a focus on Networking. Anyway, I was wrong. The team was a Network Acquisition one and the focus of the project would have been on some cost analysis to scale networks: data mining and data analysis skills were expected and that was the thing that killed me (from a candidate point of view 🙂 )

A week later (yesterday) I received a call from my recruiter who said me the expected results: the manager has found a better match than myself.

Final thoughts

Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together

Even if I failed, I feel really happy to had the opportunity to go deep in the process and performing well during all my interviews. At least, I know that all the time spent on this project is not wasted at all.

The good thing is that I have also another opportunity with another cool company which would let me work on pretty awesome projects 😉 I’ll share more details on this if it will become a real thing as I badly hope so!

As a last thing, I want to share with you this motivational video 🙂

Get up and don’t ever give up!

[Special thanks to my friend Jakub who has always supported me. Thanks dude!]